Weekly spending

An extraordinarily spendy week…

$9 – Saturday and Sunday breakfast
$34.30 – eating out over the rest of the weekend
$26 – two shirts, two singlets for T
$11 – five pairs of socks for me
$68 contacts (3 mo)
$9.50 car battery terminals (overtightened and broke when BF was doing stuff with the sound system)
$90 for groceries (woohoo! We went to the crazy expensive new New World in New Lynn as we were in the area, but shopped all the specials, and made out pretty well. The service is bordering on stalkerish- the trolley boy followed us from the door, across the carpark, and to the car. And they pack your bags for you. It’s great that it creates much-needed jobs, but I suppose that’s what jacks the prices up.)

I also tweeted last week  about this phone that I was thinking of buying. It’s a very very basic one, with a touch screen, but it has a much better camera than mine and is a huge upgrade from my 4 year old Sharp GX17!

T was also in need of a new phone – he’s been begging and borrowing other people’s castoffs for a few months now. And at half price, we figured this was a pretty good deal – ignoring the weirdness of us having the same model of phone.

The time has never seemed right for me to get a new phone, but this felt as good a time as any.

T already has his: I’m off to buy mine today. JB Hi-Fi was advertising it for cheaper than Vodafone itself (bless their hearts), so I’ll get it for $133 and hopefully sell the sim card pack for about $30. His phone cost $149, which he will pay back over the next few weeks. (He sold the sim card pack that came with it for $30, so that brings it down to $120).

Also, I took part in my first carnival! It’s now up: check out the Carnival of Personal Finance #230 at Canadian Finance blog.

I love Lee

…jeans, that is.

They are made perfectly for me. I’ve owned three pairs in my life, and every single one fit me like a dream. Seriously, you put them on, they hug you like a glove, and that’s a tall order in the denim world. SO much can go wrong. The rise, the waistband, zip vs buttons, wrinkling, length, etc. Not Lees.

I finally gave in and went on the hunt for a new pair. I wanted them to be medium to dark blue and fairly slim. All my jeans are flares, bar one black/faded pair and one light blue pair which I could no longer tolerate on my body. (They were $15 from Valleygirl on clearance three years ago, and THAT WAS FOR A REASON! I don’t know what they’re made of nor do I care to look. They stretched, lost their shape and generally look like crap on me now. I can’t even kid myself that they fit me today. It was driving me insane, I tell you, having to hitch the waist up even when belted, the way the knees sagged when tucked into boots, and the way the hems sat……..arrrrrrgh.)

I nearly passed up on this pair just for the price, but you really do get what you pay for with jeans. Here’s my $45 Lee jeans from Recycle Boutique – a place which has a lot of crap, but offers up the occasional gem as well. (Pardon the smudges…my streaky mirror is long overdue for a clean)

UPDATE: Now that I’ve worn them for a while, I’ve noticed the crotch seam is a little bulgy. I didn’t have that problem with any of my other Lee jeans. Marking this down to a 4.5/5 rather than a full 5/5.

Spending report

Another expensive week! We had to get some work done on the car so it could pass a warrant, I bought a ticket to our end of year celebration/meet the editors bash, and then food and gas for our weekend away.

I also bought a beautiful new bag earlier this week – I’d been lusting after it for months and waiting for it to go on sale, but finally gave in. Plus, I wanted it for my interview on Thursday…the one that I had to cancel, yeah. But I’m really glad I finally bought it (not to mention that my old one was falling apart); half of that I had already set aside from my birthday money, and the rest came from all the overtime I was finally paid out.

Party ticket: $30 (I had to get out $40; stupid ATMs and not giving out tenners. If I remember rightly, we spent that ten dollars on food after I got home late and exhausted on Wednesday night :S)

Almost $120 on gas (that’s two  full tanks. We used about 1.5 to get there and back, plus a fair bit of driving around while up north. The rest will last us the rest of the week. It’s unbelievable how economical the first half of the tank is – we went SO much further than we did on the second half! Must start filling the car up rather than leaving it as long as possible.

$70 to hire scooters for an afternoon up north (seriously, hooning around on scooters is a GREAT way to sightsee.) They were $35 each; we rented one for the both of us, and paid for another for a friend, who’ll pay us back later this week.

$290 for work on the car plus a warrant (check) – included fixing up the rust in the boot, two new tyres, and fixing up the loose windscreen seal and the broken driver’s door lock (done when the car was broken into in Kelston….)

$30 for engine oil and a new oil filter

$60 for food over the weekend (around $15 of which, again, we paid for our friend and are expecting back). Included disappointing food at the ‘best fish and chip shop in NZ’  in Mangonui, and breakfast on the way back to Auckland at the Texas Diner.

$4 to go through the new Northern Toll Road (both ways)

And we still have to buy groceries for the rest of the week!

I’m still not sure how we’ll deal with the extra car and gas expenses – the trip was pretty spur of the moment. T is doing a few days’ worth of one-off work, and is due to be paid again for his coaching work (we’re still not sure how their pay cycle works. He was paid once, halfway through LAST month and not again since. He started there at the beginning of September, but had three weeks off due to school holidays, plus one rain day and today being a public holiday).

Despite the massive mountain of assignments I had to work on, this weekend shaped up pretty well!

I did a quick mystery shop on Sunday, did a spot of baking (using a recipe I’d been wanting to try out for ages), and caught up on laundry (I was all out of clean undies – no joke).

We also went grocery shopping – last week we spent $20 less than the budget, and this week we came in right on target. For our $120, we got tons of veggies, meat, as well as a couple of treats. Strawberries are back in season – woohoo! We also bought a couple of herbs – chives and basil – which I want to put out in the garden.

And lastly, we went up Mt Albert and went for a walk around the top. Now I’ve been up Mt Roskill, Mt Eden, Mt Atkinson… but never Mt Albert. The entrance is tucked up some leafy side streets; you’d never know how to get up there! The hillside is obviously a pretty wealth area. The houses are old and palatial and I wouldn’t even want to guess at how much they go for. Anyway, it was all very quaint – we went for a bit of a jaunt around the peak, looked for four-leaf clovers (unsuccessfully) and T picked a few flowers for me. Very Enid Blyton.

Spending

I finally got paid for all my overtime back during Fashion Week! Most of this went towards cancelling out the overdraft we racked up over the moving period.

$50 in Vodafone topups for both me and T
$22 at the butcher
$25 on gas
$80 at the supermarket
$22 at Fruit World
$21 pn misc. food and drink

Spending report

Ouch, is all I can say. We spent quite a bit on food and fun – on Saturday our pantry was bare, so we bought lunch, then we headed over to the Diwali festival downtown at night, indulged in some scrummy Indian food, then onto a bar for a 21st. The bus lockout is also wreaking havoc on my budget and probably will continue to do so all week.

$20 for gas
$20 for the bus (thanks to the lockout)
$15 that BF spent on lunches during the week and technically wasn’t supposed to…
$9.30 for dinner on Thursday and $5 for my lunch on Friday (again, with the running out of food! This week though, I drew up a meal plan. AND we spent less on groceries than normal)
$4.50 for an emergency run to the shop for toilet paper
$8.20 for lunch on Saturday
$20 cash withdrawn, of which we spent $18 on various dishes from the stalls at Diwali. So worth it!!
$8 for two drinks at the bar
$3 for BF’s contribution to a barbecue today.

I also need to pay back one of my friends for a joint birthday gift from last week – I THINK it was about $24; I asked her to send me the details again, but she hasn’t replied…

Weekend spending

Our kettle started leaking a while ago, and I finally got around to returning it this weekend. T’s sister had a spare one which she gave us, so we got a straight refund instead of simply exchanging it for a new one!

So, in: $29.99 back to us.

Out: $120 for groceries

$3 for six months worth of the pill

$12.99 for Saturday lunch (Indian food. So good)

$5 for a cocktail at my friend’s party (gotta love subsidised drinks)

$12 for a mini screwdriver set T needed to do one little job. Still considering whether to take it back – I guess it’s a little unethical though, plus he wants to keep it!

2. In many tests, offenders who receive restorative justice
commit fewer repeat crimes than offenders who do not.
3. In no large-sample test has RJ increased repeat offending
compared with CJ.

Spending roundup

$31.50 – trailer hire

$20 – rubbish dumping (This really hurts…none of this was mine! It really irks me how much crap our flatmates accumulated, and left behind. Tyres, broken chairs, car parts, etc. We got rid of 400kg, apparently).

$25 – gas

$15 – food, all from the bakery; that’s two days of lunches over the weekend

$120 groceries

$110 monthly bus pass.

As usual, this is pretty much all from the weekend… we rarely spend anything during the week and I don’t anticipate spending anything over the next few days!

Spending report

We spent a fair bit on discretionary stuff this last fortnight.

Week 1
$10 to enrol T for learning workshops at uni.
$12.50 on (A Question of) Scruples, a board game everyone should play at least once in their lives.
$3 beer for T at his friend’s 21st
$14.90 on Saturday dinner from Pizza to Go

Plus over $50 on gas, due to driving around getting quotes for car repair, out to T’s sister’s, and out to the school for his new p/t coaching job.

Also, it seems that $10 registration fee was for nothing. I booked him in for an essay writing workshop on a Thursday. He never made it, thanks to neighbourhood dramas, and having to wait for the police to take statements. And no, there aren’t anymore writing workshops scheduled.

Week 2
$20 on face wash plus eye drops
$4 for a headband
$15 on roadside hangi
$10 on Chinese
$28 at the zoo (I want to be a sea lion!)

The zoo was pretty freaking awesome, and T had been keen to go for awhile as last year he did some work there and wanted to see it up and functioning. We went on Monday – the first day of semester break – figuring it would be fairly quiet. Not so! Anklebiters were everywhere, and everyone seemed to either be pregnant or have at least two kids with them. I think there was also some sort of school trip on.

The only real disappointment I had was that the hippos were sleeping. We kept cruising back to check on them, but every time they were still in the same spot buried in a pool of mud. The tigers and lions were also napping in the heat – it really is spring!

What do you hate paying for?

From Sunday’s paper: 10 things we hate to pay for. Though it seems to me largely cribbed from a similar MSN Money piece, 15 overpriced things we hate paying for.

Here’s the list in short:
ATM fees
Movie refreshments
Carparking
BYO wine
Bottled water
Holiday surcharges
Online ticketing
Dental fees
Wedding surcharges
Commodity price rises

To that list, I might add: although holiday surcharges suck, workers are entitled to time and a half on public holidays. You would be, so don’t begrudge paying the extra 15%. I usually don’t eat out on holidays, or if I do, I try not to moan too much about it. And…as good as popcorn always smells at the cinema, it NEVER EVER EVER tastes half as good as it smells! On the odd occasion that I give in and buy some, I’m always disappointed.

Other things I hate buying: Eye drops. They don’t cost all that much – $5 to 10 – but you have to buy them every month! Which brings me to that other monthly expense I resent: tampons. I also find myself buying socks far, far too often, along with pens and razors (for T).

Cirque du Soleil – Dralion

Tsk. After being pleasantly surprised to find I got paid for the two weeks I interned back in July, my bank balance was looking a bit healthier (seeing as I had budgeted to NOT get paid, and saved accordingly). And after buying half a car with BF, I just wanted to keep beefing up the savings as much as I could.

Don’t worry, I didn’t quite wipe out the progress I made. But….I got an email advising us of a special staff offer – discounted Cirque du Soleil tickets. I was really surprised, cause I thought Dralion had already left town. Seeing a Cirque show is one of my to-do-before-I-die things, so after a bit of agonising, I decided to take the plunge and just do it. Overtime plus birthday money covered it all. Might not have been frugal, but it will be an experience…an extravagant, splashy-outy one, but one I have been SET on and not just a random decision. Seats cost us $95 each (down from $119), plus booking fee which came to just under $200. There were also cheaper seats ($75 and $50), but they were so far back and off to the side, we nixed that idea. 

Just ORDERING tickets was somewhat exhilarating. I’m a total noob to this stuff. I’ve never played Lotto – wouldn’t know where to start – and I’ve never bought tickets to anything online (I’ve tried, though, oh how I’ve tried. 2007 RHCP concert comes to mind). I was all worried, wondering how I would get the tickets – would they be sent out in time? What if we got crap seats? Ah, the wonders of technology. I get to PRINT my own tickets, and we got to CHOOSE our very specific seats using their awesome java-type programme which showed a seating plan of the entire place.

* * *

Anywho, Thursday was the night, and it was amazing.  (It was a spendy night.  We made an evening of it – I had classes, then work, and T had his class in the afternoon, so we met up, ate dinner at the Roundabout pub in Royal Oak ($33), popped across the road to get a drink and snack to take with us from Pak n Save ($4), parked – right up front with the VIPs and VWs, BMWs and Holdens, because a friend of T’s was the parking guy ($6) and one ridiculously overpriced hot dog for him ($5.50).

What can I say? If you’ve seen it, you know how incredible the things they do are. If not, well, they were just unbelievable. The goofy Italian-looking clown/ringmasters did a great job of entertaining us at the start, end, and between acts, without ever speaking a word (of English, that is. They squawked, shrieked and laughed aplenty and had us rolling around at their slapstick antics. They recruited a man from the audience to play along on stage with them, who we later found out was actually part of the whole act.)  There were crazy contortionists, twisting themselves into positions I almost couldn’t bear to watch. There was balancing on poles, balls, hands, heads. Graceful dancers of all kinds, albeit in rather corny costumes. There were amazing aerial acts, swooping around on lengths of silk; dancing dragons; juggling to the power of ten; tiny dancers forming human tiers three and four tall; lizard like trampolinists soaring up, down and back onto the walls, seemingly sticking to them like real life spidermen. We both agreed they were our favourite act – they seemed to defy physics and gravity, never losing momentum, yet never stumbling as you might expect each time they sprung up and came to a crisp pause at the top of the walls.

An honourable mention also goes to the last couple of acts – the rings and the skipping. The supporting performers got their chance to shine, instead of simply dancing and slithering around the main acts; they mounted rings of all sizes onto a mini trampoline and dived, vaulted and flipped through them – gave me bad flashbacks to gym class, actually. They fouled up a couple of times, which just endeared them in my eyes. They swiftly regrouped and repositioned their hoops and carried on, uber-professionally. They even almost managed to do so in time to the music. I wasn’t too keen on the second part, however – skipping and flipping through massive jump ropes of yellow material, which caused far too many mistakes. The pyramid jumps were the most nervewracking. The poor guys at the bottom were obviously shaking under the strain, and it was painful to watch. Too many slipups in that one.

It’s almost better to watch some of them in slow motion, so you don’t miss anything. One, because sometimes they’re just that damn fast, and two because for the multitasking-challenged like me, it’s hard to focus on more than one thing, and there’s so much going on at once.

It made me want to be part of a show again. I’m not a performer, but I get a buzz out of being involved with them. Every single year I was in the school talent quest doing something; I hated being on stage, but perversely, I got such a massive high off it and would be walking on air afterwards. And I have such great memories of intermediate – my school devoted second term, every year, to the schoolwide production. It was always a musical, and EVERY student was involved, if not acting, singing or dancing, then doing lights, sound or props. Our shows were always brilliant, because that was our job everyday for two months, not just fitting in rehearsals after and before school. They probably don’t do that anymore – it was pretty unorthodox, and the teachers behind it have probably gone by now – but I think it was a fantastic idea.