25 / 01 / 01

Saving Money in New Zealand - 2025 Edition

As the cost of living continues to rise, finding ways to save money in New Zealand has become more important than ever. Whether you’re looking to trim your grocery bill, lower your energy costs, or get more from your everyday spending, there are plenty of strategies you can use to make your money go further.

Over the past few years I’ve spent a lot of time tracking my subscriptions (Blog post to come) - Looking at ways to save and also how I can get the best deal out of my day to day spendings. Even if its a 1% cashback on spending, it all add’s up over.

Food / Groceries

  • Grocer - My #1 recommendation for identifying ways to save if you are doing a large regular grocery shop or just want to price compare across multiple stores. Now covering 6 different stores including The Warehouse and Fresh Choice, it helps you break down your entire grocery shop and identify ways to save and take advantage of specials between multiple stores.

  • Cheapies - Once again, cheapies to the rescue with a break down of upcoming or current details for Fast Food Retailers across New Zealand.

  • McDonalds / KFC App Deals - While I don’t often have KFC or McDonalds - They do often have some good deals that are only available via their App (such as McDonalds Cheesy Pleaser).

  • Foodprint - Similar to the Too Good to Go app, this provides you access to end of day or ages items at stores often at a large discount - Make sure to enable notifications for your favourite stores.

  • FirstTable - For between $8-15 you can receive 50% off your bill for two, three or four people who are dining.

Flights

  • Beat That Flight - Covering price deals, errors and ways to make the most out of your airline memberships, BeatThatFlight are great for knowing about any flight deals across NZ and Australia.

  • Regional Gotta Go - Air NZ - Last minute Air NZ fares between regional and main centers - Dependant on seats being available but are a fixed rate of $169 for single sector or $249 for multiple sector flight - Saving you up to $200.

Finance / Money

  • Shopback - Regularly offering up to 30% cashback on eligible purchases at stores like JD Sports, Adidas, New Balance and more - Shopback is an easy way to earn extra money of your normal day to day spending.

  • American Express - Maybe a controversial addition, but the Gold Amex Card is a $200 a year fee but comes with 2 x $100 dining credits essentially making it a free card. If you are able to control your spending there is often great offers (such as $5 off $10 spends at small businesses) you can take advantage of without building up debt.

Mobile / Internet

  • Broadband Compare - Probably the closest tool you can use to compare base prices across different providers. Would still recommend doing your own research into the different providers or any additional sign up offers you may be able to get or discounts for bundling things like Electricity and Broadband.

  • Mobile is a hard one as sign up offers seem to change month to month and can vary depending on your requirements and which network suits your needs (I might break this down more in the future). For now, I’d suggest just looking at what offers people are doing at the time and making your decision based off that.

Power / Energy

  • Power Compare - Identical to Broadband Compare mentioned above but for your electricity provider pricing. Allowing you to compare all the different pricing options for your address within a single view.

Clearance / Sales

  • Synergy - A shameless plug as I co-own this business, but a $40 a month membership provides you access to discord alerts for 40+ NZ based stores including sales monitors for stores like JD Sports, JB HiFi and more.

  • Cheapies - Has a great page covering the list of all the major NZ retailers (and some smaller stores) and their online clearance sections.

Health/Wellness

  • Suppspy - I’ve only just come across Suppspy recently, but it breaks down the pricing for supplements, protein powders/bars, pre-workout and many other health related items so you can get the best deals.

Websites / Apps

  • Gaspy - Similar to Grocer, Gaspy takes community sourced information for tracking fuel prices across your town and city, allowing you to identify what station has the cheapest prices - Including allowing you to factor in Fuel Discounts to ensure your seeing the cheapest options.

  • Cheapies - I owe a lot to the cheapies community from over the years, tracking almost every local sale, deal or special, I easily check Cheapies 10+ times a day to ensure I don’t miss anything.

  • CSC (For Sole Traders/Business Owners) - If you are a business owner or are part of an organization - CSC Buying Group provides you access to free discounts across New Zealand at top retailers like Noel Leeming, OfficeMax and more.

Price Matching

Finally, price matching - While it can be awkward to ask a worker to price match another retailer, in todays day and age every dollar counts. If you can save even $5 on a purchase, you’ve earned yourself a free coffee.

Some of my favourites are:

money
NZ Discounts