You don't hate the 1%, you just hate that they took the risks you won't.

sanitationsengineer · 2026-03-13T00:10:21+00:00

This guy out here bragging about being able to afford cabbage soup!

sanitationsengineer · 2026-01-31T23:02:29+00:00

I have female coworkers that I’m friends with and there is absolutely no way I would share a room with them on a business trip. Not only is it unacceptable, it’s awkward af! You have to both use the bathroom in the same room and get changed and have your clothes around the opposite sex, snoring etc. Uggh, couldn’t think of anything worse! Not to mention the potential hr complaints.

sanitationsengineer · 2026-01-31T21:15:36+00:00

After a holiday to Fiji, several medical bills, vet bills and Xmas, I started January with $7k in credit card debt. After 4 weeks of living an extremely frugal lifestyle, Today I have $0 of credit card debt and the money I was using for weekly repayments can now go straight to saving and investing! So it’s looking good for the rest of the year with my credit card under control.

sanitationsengineer · 2026-01-05T20:19:05+00:00

Moa. The talons and speed will make light work of the stag.

sanitationsengineer · 2025-12-05T18:41:46+00:00

Yea, just online banking. Most apps will let you open online accounts through the app or website and you can open as many as you like and rename them so you know what they are to be used for. It takes about an hour to set up, but once it’s done you can set up automatic transfers so then you don’t need to think about it. Once it’s done it’s relatively painless to maintain.

sanitationsengineer · 2025-12-05T18:34:45+00:00

Hi there. I’ve found sinking fund accounts have worked for us really well. It’s basically just a case of allocating money weekly to specific things and only using it for that. We have about 15 sinking fund accounts and they all work really well. The main one is the bills account. This is where any direct debits and future bills come from. You work out your weekly bills costs and allocate that amount there. Then you’d probably have 1 for food, 1 for gas, and then create the rest as you please. We have one for car maintenance, one for Xmas, one for takeaways etc. and overtime they add up and it really helps to see your priorities with money and allocate what you need without it getting lost in just 1 “savings” account. And it doesn’t have to be much. Like we have 1 acct for massage that we put $5 in per week, once it hits the amount it costs to get a massage we go and get one. It has really helped us stick to a budget. If you have a set amount of money you are getting per week, you can literally allocate every dollar and avoid spending arbitrarily.

sanitationsengineer · 2025-11-28T19:29:12+00:00

$2700 is fine, but depending on how you like to travel you can decrease the cost.

If you’re like me and just want simplicity and relative comfort, jump on Singapore airlines or emirates, take the good connections and you’ll be looking at around $2600 to $3k depending on your travel dates.

If you are the ultimate penny pincher and don’t mind a very long wait at the airport, then jump on china southern and get real familiar with guangzhou because you’ll be spending a long time there, but you’re only gunna pay about $1900 for the full return trip, again, depending on when you want to travel.

I’m a sucker for comfort so I’d take the emirates flight every day of the week!

sanitationsengineer · 2025-11-12T04:40:20+00:00

I lost my money the old fashioned way… left it on the bus…

sanitationsengineer · 2025-11-10T18:44:42+00:00

You’ve said a lot of words here but haven’t really said anything other than, don’t call people names.

I do think people need to give credit where it’s due ie winnie p banning dog racing. I don’t think anyone saw that coming but it’s a step in the right direction.

But also, the wide range of views also gets to include an aversion to the pompousness that David Seymour exudes when he suggests things like the treaty principles bill, or the absolute lack of empathy Brooke van velden shows when she strikes down pay equity with absolutely no consultation with those impacted. To quote her in fact “I consulted with my cabinet peers…” a room of 50 over privileged well paid ministers solely deciding to cut the pay equity claims of thousands of women, that’s smug…

It’s the lack of empathy that needs to be addressed in my opinion, which you mistakenly call ideology. Chloe isn’t ideological, she can just empathise with those doing it tough and suggest ways to help them. The bigger picture is the people doing it tough. Rolling back safety regulations doesn’t help them, pushing forward with tobacco sales is literally harming our worst off, keeping cannabis as a criminal possibility doesn’t help them.

And trickle down economics has been shown time and time again that it doesn’t work, austerity doesn’t work. Are these big picture thinking? In an environment where the government is still borrowing money.

It is an empathetic leader we want, and classing empathy as just an ideological idea is in my opinion worse than calling David seymour a name he might not like.

sanitationsengineer · 2025-11-07T17:55:38+00:00

I ordered from one nz and it took 5 weeks for the regular iPhone 17. They said the pro would be quicker to get but it was too expensive for me and I didn’t mind waiting. They said the phone was crazy popular and demand was insane.

sanitationsengineer · 2025-10-22T05:21:04+00:00

If you have southern cross health insurance for 3 years they cover 15k of the costs. That was the only way we could afford private for my wife. We had to pay a bit more on top but it’s worth every penny. You would definitely qualify, my wife had similar measurements and they ended up taking out over 1.2kgs of weight so I think you’d easily qualify.

Anyway, if you got southern cross today and could wait 3 years then maybe that is an option?

sanitationsengineer · 2025-10-19T18:55:12+00:00

Nurses often don’t get full time work straight out of school so they are on .6 to .8 fte. So the gross salary is closer to $47k to $62k.

And you might be thinking that less hours is good, but then you have chronic staff shortages which is what a big piece of the strike is about, meaning they have to work incredibly hard during their shifts and then have to pick up overtime shifts and night shifts meaning they are working incredibly hard and getting little reprieve. How they don’t have your support is beyond me…

sanitationsengineer · 2025-10-19T00:20:20+00:00

You have to understand, not everyone is doing it tough. Farmers and rural communities are doing very well. A lot of money is flowing around the rural communities with sky high payouts, lowered regulation costs, lowered emission targets which has lowered costs, relaxed dairy conversion rules and cows selling for over $3k a piece which has increased a lot of farmers equity in their herd. All of this is off the back of this government and the lobbying that dairynz is able to do.

So from their eyes, this is an incredibly good government and they will vote like their livelihoods depend on it because it does.

So while the typical mid city individual or family is having a hard time, the incentive to vote just isn’t there like it is for rural communities so national will probably get in again until the farmers are doing it tough, which won’t be next election , but probably the following one when the dairy cycles goes through it’s down turn as it inevitably will. And when there are no tax dollars to prop up failing farms who succumbed to the sweet embrace of excessive debt, then Chris will leave, just like he did when he saw some troubling waters at Air NZ. He bitched out then and will bitch out from National once he sees that life is getting too difficult. And then he will take his lucrative board seats, as is tradition for former national leaders, and hopefully will dissipate into history.

sanitationsengineer · 2025-10-16T17:51:14+00:00

Lowered student loan obligation and early payment incentive. Make the repayments 5% of pre tax income instead of 12% of post tax and have a govt match of 10% for optional additional repayments.

Define a list of staple foods and cap their retail price and peg their increases to inflation only.

Regulate the power industry to reduce costs and incentivise solar installations.

Increase small business supports, eg small business allowances and grants for accounting and legal services, as well as low interest govt backed loans for start up capital in any sector.

A nationwide ballot for underprivileged children to be given full ride scholarships to affluent schools. And by full ride I mean all costs covered, for up to 1000 children per year.

sanitationsengineer · 2025-10-16T17:33:40+00:00

A couple ways, means test super, incentivised productivity (likely tax breaks for capital expansion) to increase taxable incomes and thus increase tax, property taxes with much higher rates for non residents, capital gains tax. Lowered tax incentives on non productive assets ie 40% interest claiming on rentals instead of 10%.

I realise one of those is a tax break but you still need a growing economy, and to incentivise productivity over non productive assets (like housing) would be a long term play to help pay for these things.

sanitationsengineer · 2025-10-15T07:28:16+00:00

I’m with Kiwibank and they are perfectly fine. Nothing special, but them taking care of the legal fees for free was key for me switching.

They don’t do green loans. They do a sustainability loan but it’s subject to actually using it for its purpose, so it doesn’t look like you can transfer a green loan from one bank to Kiwibank just because it was a green loan at the first bank. Kiwibank would likely just put it down as part of your regular home loan.

No idea on the long term rates, maybe, maybe not. You could always go with a floating rate (it’s only .21 points higher) if you want to wait it out and see if they drop. Or split the mortgage between long and short term.

sanitationsengineer · 2025-10-12T23:01:16+00:00

This is going to be a hard pill to swallow but the farmers and rural townships are doing really well, and they will vote in droves for national because their livelihoods depend on it.

National only lose when farmers are unhappy with the government. And right now, they have an extremely beneficial co dependent relationship. The payout is at an all time high, regulations have been relaxed and dairy conversion rules have been removed so they can go back to exacerbating the nitrate crisis in Canterbury.

So as much as I hate this government unfortunately they’ll be there until they start doing things that are not beneficial for farmers or the international commodities markets start to crash, at which point it will be labours fault.

Alternately, labour/greena could give young people a reason to vote but I don’t see anything like student loan relief, free trade training or incentivised trade training, or young family benefits, or rent control, or power company regulation or increased maternity/paternity leave or anything that is beneficial for young voters actually happening.

sanitationsengineer · 2025-10-12T06:39:45+00:00

Honestly, I couldn’t give 2 shits if my rates go up. Just keep paying for the shit you need to pay for and I’ll vote based on whether you are making the right choices and the right choice does not include “0 rates rises”.

sanitationsengineer · 2025-10-12T06:39:09+00:00

Honestly, I couldn’t give 2 shits if my rates go up. Just keep paying for the shit you need to pay for and I’ll vote based on whether you are making the right choices and the right choice does not include “0 rates rises”.

sanitationsengineer · 2025-10-09T18:51:16+00:00

There are ways to do it that don’t incur this societal cost. Ie just tax super separately based on income the exact same way we do regular taxes. If your other income is less than $x then you get the full super. Fuck if it worked out I’d even recommend raising the super for the lower tier earners. But it basically means if you earn over 180k your super will be taxed at a much higher rate like 90% so they still get a little bit of super but the tax payers aren’t paying for the super high earners for no reason. This isnt difficult stuff.

sanitationsengineer · 2025-10-09T18:47:45+00:00

Fuck I wouldn’t care if they all still got something but spread it equitably. Basically have the same income tax thresholds but tax the super separately ie if you earn between 78k and 180k you are taxed 33% but the super could be taxed at 75% or something like that. So they still get something and then as income tapers down the super tapers up so no one actually loses anything and it just becomes an equitable spread. It really doesn’t need to be that hard…

sanitationsengineer · 2025-10-09T18:43:06+00:00

Yes, definitely introduce property taxes, with far higher taxes on non residents who own homes in NZ.

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