Austerity measures

As you can imagine, 18 months without work leads to some serious austerity measures. Fortunately between my partner getting a part-time job and our international student payments offset some of the costs, but we both dipped deep into our savings. (My partner's ex has not paid child support in two and a half years, and New Zealand lets him get away with that because he works out of the country and they decided it wasn't worth the hassle!)

Oddly, the last 'luxury' was free range eggs, and we were staring down the barrel of homelessness before we finally started buying battery farm eggs (which were half the price). My partner has already said the first thing she is going to do when I get paid is go back to free range eggs.

Of course, the eggs don't represent luxury, they represent the ability to make a choice. (Of course it could be argued a better choice would be to raise our own chickens, or to not eat eggs in the first place!)

Apart from the eggs, we've lived very frugally: no holidays, no major purchases, no cable TV. Clothes came from charity shops and gifts were often handmade. That said, we still did a heck of a lot, but there was always a sense of a brick wall waiting for us to smash into it.

Now that I have an income again, the brick wall has been averted, but the only  extravagance -- apart from the eggs -- is to take the kids to California to meet my family, and the only reason that's possible is because I will be travelling to the US and UK for work.

Otherwise we continue with the austerity measures until the savings have been adequately topped up, in the hopes that next year we'll be in a position to buy a house.

(On a related note, we took the kids to see the new house today and they loved it. One even asked if we could move earlier! I just pointed out we have a lot to pack in the next two weeks...)