Balance Transfers – A Kiwi Microfinance Blog
Everything Micro Nothing Macro
This tag is for ideas that can reduce your costs.
New Zealand is nearing full employment. The government has just announced a series of increases not only to the minimum wage, but to allowances and pensions as well. Fuel has jumped above $2 per litre for most parts of New Zealand, with a clear plan to increase the excise by 3c per litre per year. So why is now a good time, with all the money going around, to start to adopt some inflation-smart practices?
Continue reading “Why it’s a good idea now to start using inflation smart strategies”
This is a calculator to figure out how much you can save from incidental travel – ie all the short distance travel you make during the week, such as to the supermarket, to the beach, to the movies and to town.
You’re thinking about buying an electric car and toting up all the various cost savings and lifestyle change pros and cons. But wait – before you make such a large financial commitment, have you stopped to consider whether a car is even necessary?
Continue reading “Ebikes versus electric cars – pros and cons”
Here is a nice and simple calculator to help you figure out how much you will save in parking fees and fines by travelling to work and parking an ebike instead of a motorcar.
As part of my preparation for travelling to work each day, I hired a mountain bike to test out the voyage from Paraparaumu (where my new office is) to Otaki and back again. This was stage one in committing to an ebike to travel into work – I needed to check that the coast was clear and that there were no major obstacles on the route. I also wanted to get a sense of what it would be like to go there and back if my bike battery ran out, so I would know how it would be under the worst circumstances. And this is what I learnt…
Continue reading “Is the coast clear? Ebiking from Otaki to Paraparaumu Beach for work”
I’ve finally figured out how to create calculators on this blog – so here is my first calculator, hopefully first of many! Just a simple way to roughly calculate the amount of money you save in fuel by transiting to work on an ebike.
Continue reading “Fuel savings calculator – how much do you save by travelling to work on an ebike?”
I got in the habit of riding my bike to work every day while visiting my mum up in the Coromandel and I’m finding it a rather hard habit to shake. The problem is, now my work is 25 km away instead of 5 km away. Could an ebike help with this situation?
Today I intend to lay out a system that works well in harnessing the power of the sun, without the need for any costly solar power batteries.
Continue reading “Excuse me, but why does anybody need solar power batteries?”
For the past few months, while I’ve supported my mother through a sickness, I’ve been working as a prep chef in a busy commercial cafe in a coastal town. My main observation has been of how energy transfers within a commercial kitchen. It is one of those things that I’m sure no one else would find remotely interesting, but that fascinates me intensely. In a busy commercial kitchen, not a single joule is wasted. Everything is on just for long enough to deliver the desired result, and then it is shut off. A busy commercial kitchen seems to operate on a fine line between careful resource management and deft resources as the chef arranges a wide array of components in the last few seconds before the plating.
Continue reading “Energy Transfers In The Commercial Kitchen”
Much more than anything else, this blog is just a repository for things that I learn, enabling me to cement the learning process by listing and recounting the steps involved in a new process. So I make no apology for the fact that the blog hops from topic to topic and appears to have no external consistency whatsoever.