No one likes being broke, but here we are. Brokeness is unfortunately a situation that arises all too often for students, caused by the many temptations of Dunedin, and the little income we get to spend on them. Retirees get $80 extra in the winter for heating costs and 15% off groceries with their gold cards. Students get an alcohol blanket (if they can afford it) and 10% off vape juice or sandwiches with their Radio 1 Card, which seems almost fair. It’s up to student loans to help pay out the rest, which is made worse by the fact that it’s the only government benefit the recipients actually have to pay back.
But this paycheck has just been given a bit of a bump. Thanks to supermarket collusion, a captive rental market and big-time inflation, even Dunedin, perhaps the second-cheapest Uni rental market after Canterbury, has become un-livable on $242 a week. As of 1 April (joke’s on us!), the government has decided to extend the future skilled professionals and high-wage earners of New Zealand an enormous amount of credit by loaning us a whopping $25 extra per week. Combined with annual adjustment, this should bring the total claimable living costs to $272. Many in the student population may be stunned by the vast wealth which they will now find at their weekly disposal, and while our news piece last week highlighted alcohol and spinach as two of the things students were most excited to shell out for, here are a few other options that you can take advantage of, at least until everyone’s rents simultaneously, and definitely un-suspiciously, increase by $25.
5 value-range pizzas
Perhaps the only basket of goods in NZ that remains impervious to inflation, the Domino’s Value Pizza Range™ provides a last refuge of caloric value for those that are either too intoxicated or too hungover to prepare a meal. With your new fortune, you can sustain yourself nearly indefinitely on value pizzas. Buying two a day will do untold damage to your body, but it will, without a doubt, be cheaper than going to the supermarket.
0.00038 Bitcoin
If you’re looking to get into cryptocurrency, now is the perfect opportunity to kickstart your portfolio. Although you may have concerns about making investments in a totally unregulated market, disregard them. Fortune favours the bold and the University even has a crypto club which you can join to avoid losing all of your money within 2 hours of investing. If you invest $25 a week, it will only take you 50 years to own one entire bitcoin all by yourself.
10 litres of petrol
With the average mileage of a 2014 VW Golf at 6.9 L/100k, this gives you an additional range of 72 km (return trip). You can now take extravagant weekend getaways without a second thought, as your new fuel money enables you to take trips to the South Island tourist hotspots featured in your wildest dreams, like scenic Mosgiel! Accessible destinations also include Milton, Palmerston and Moeraki. If you’re really pushing your range, even Balclutha and Herbert, famed for their agrarian beauty, are on the cards.
A box of alcohol
Okay, sure. We said that this list would be full of options besides piss, but let’s be honest, who doesn’t think, upon hearing of a $25 surplus, that the figure sounds suspiciously similar to the average price of a box of alcohol? If you run the numbers, Studylink has almost perfectly averaged between the lower $22-23 value of a box of beer and the higher $26-27 value of a pricier box of RTDs. Perhaps the new change comes not from government concern for students but, rather, lobbying from large alcohol companies (let us not name names but there are only three of them in the whole world), that students have not been consuming enough alcohol in recent years.