[TonyOne]

My Wife is having second thoughts about our planned move next year. Her concerns include not been able to survive on one wage. We have an 8 month old son and if we do move she will be a housewife and look after him, I will hopefully be earning around 60k dollars.
Is 60k dollars enough to survive on in Auckland, initially we won't be going out much (to pubs or for late nights) as we have our son to look after but we do enjoy the occasional meal, we will be renting (around $300 p.w.) we don't have much money to bring with us so we won't be able to dip into that to survive.

[Lupin]

It's the million dollar question :)

Depends what you're earning now, what your current lifestyle is, what you're happy to accept as a lifestyle baseline and what you want from NZ.

We'll be doubling our income (ie 2x as many $ as £) but we're further down the foodchain and live a fairly basic lifestyle and can see a point in the future where our income will significantly increase. HTH a little!

[jubjub]

OK, your take home will be around $3700 per month. In Auckland, you will be lucky to get a rental for $300 in a nice area, you may be nearer $400, so around $1600 a month

leaves you $2000 a month.

We have a son a month older than yours...

Nappies about $90 a month for disposables

Baby Food, depending on if you feed home made food/breastmilk or not, (the ready made range is not great here by the way) you would spend $15-20 for a tin of formula and $1.50 each for the large food jars. will let you work that one out for the month!

Power, our leccy goes from $100 to $250 a month depending on season. we have a woodburner and have been lucky to have free wood so far, there are some posts about costs of firewood if you do a search.

Insurances car/life/house $200, you would save about $50 for just covering contents in a rental (two cars are covered in this)

Food/Petrol all depends on how much cooking you do from scratch and how long your commute to work is, this is the hardest thing to do a comparison with, we spend about 1400 on these two, we run two cars and I do a lot of home cooking, we have a takeaway about once a week, or if we eat out, we skip a takeaway week to make up for extra cost.

ETA:- the groceries include a 12 pack of bottled lager and two bottles of wine (cheap stuff!)

You may just get by on that amount, but we struggled on a similar sum until hubby got a payrise.

HTH a bit...

[browner_]

Im sure you can do it on $60k (much of Auckland is living on less income than that I can assure you!) , but will have to make some sacrifices of course.

I think you need to think about why you are coming and what you expect to be better, and then make sure that is going to be the case.