Surviving on mince and sausages, and wearing second-hand clothes – that’s the plight some pensioners face as the cost of living crisis continues.
Those living away from major cities are also feeling the pinch, even if they do not rely solely on the pension.
The amount New Zealand’s pensioners are spending each week has been broken down in a recent report from Massey University.
For Donald O’Meara and his partner, it is vital that they stick to their budget on their well-planned grocery shops or monthly trips to The Warehouse to stock up on essentials such as toilet paper on Gold Card special day.
“Very basic and I mean like very basic. It’s like sausages and mince. They’re a good staple in the house,” he said.
The 68-year-old lives in the Auckland suburb of Point England and puts away some money each week, but that is for bills and costs as they arise.
Clothes are bought from the Salvation Army, and sometimes even the list of essentials is cut on shopping trips.
“Prices have moved and we can’t afford it, so little things get chopped as we go around.”
Using criteria in the latest Retirement Expenditure Guidelines from Massey University’s New Zealand Financial Education and Research Centre, O’Meara and his partner are on a no-frills budget.
Single people in that category spend about $690 a week in metro areas – Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch – and about $560 in provincial areas – everywhere else.
For two-person households, that spending rises to about $910 in metro areas and $1030 in provincial areas.
Pension incomes are set at about $520 for single people and just under $800 for couples.
That fixed income has put the squeeze on as prices across the board rise, as O’Meara has found.
“Three or four years ago, we were able to afford to go out and buy ourselves a little lunch. About once every three months we put enough aside to go out, say, to buy a pie and a donut and sit down by the water.
“Nowadays it’s almost impossible for us to do that sort of thing.”
The Massey guidelines also look at households living on what they call a choices budget.
Expenditure there is about $770 a week in metro areas and $750 in provincial areas for single-person households, and $1740 for metro and $1200 for provincial in two-person households.
Report author Associate Professor Claire Matthews said in most cases, metro spend more than the provincial, but the difference between them varied
“But there was one pairing where actually the provincial households spend more than the metro, which is for the two-person households for the no frills lifestyle,” she said.
She said it was hard to be specific about why that was.
“What it may reflect is that for whatever reason, households that fit this criteria have potentially moved from the metro area and moved to the provincial area so that they can spend more, if that makes sense. So that they’ve got more flexibility.”
That was the case for 71-year-old Ant Kennedy and his wife, who live in Whataroa, about an hour and 20 minutes south of Hokitika on the West Coast.
Kennedy and his wife moved there from Levin for lifestyle reasons, and he said they could sit between the no-frills and choices categories, although they were lucky they can draw on their old government pension schemes.
Petrol – at more than $3 a litre – was the one thing that forced them to budget, planning trips to the bigger centres for shopping.
“My wife, for example, today she’s gone up for a medical appointment in Greymouth, so she’ll go up to that. But on the way home, she’ll do a big shop,” he said.
“You fit your shopping in as much as you can when you’re going to town for other things.”
In between they rely on the local shop, which is expensive – milk is $7 for two litres, well above the $4.50 or so it can usually be found in most places.
But that was a price Kennedy said he was okay with paying for other reasons.
“These small communities, we rely on the local dairy, the local cafe or whatever it is, and their prices are obviously high,” he said.
“But if we don’t support that, they fold their tent and they disappear, and you see on the West Coast remnants of that.”
But moving out of Auckland was not really an option for O’Meara, even if he and his partner wanted to.
“My partner comes from Katikati down in Tauranga. The thing is with that if we wanted to do that, the cost of us having to do that would be it’s inhibitive.”
rnz.co.nz
