Diana Clement: Do you spend too much on food and wine?

If your kids insist on designer jeans, they could pay the top-up that label adds to the price. Photo / Getty Images

Have you ever wondered what your neighbours spend? And is your spending "normal"?

We overshare about most of our lives on social media. But we don't share with others what we spend. So I did.

I found that there is no "normal" when it comes to households.

A household with two working adults and two pre-schoolers has vastly different costs to a single income household with two teenagers.

Some households genuinely can't get around without two cars, whereas others with two adults only need one, or in rare circumstances none.

Thanks to the Women in Super group I've had an insight into what other people like me spend.

Just over 30 of the members agreed to keep spending diaries, which are being analysed by Pushpa Wood, director of Massey University's Fin-Ed Centre.

These women are well educated and work in financial services. Yet the majority thought they could do better with their spending thanks to the diary exercise. Their comments included:

• "This certainly clarified my spending on clothes. Clothes are my big extravagance and I should spend less"

• "Interesting and scary! ....plus how expensive children are"

• "Found that we just spend money without any thought or planning"

• "I noticed that my husband actually spends a lot more than I do so we are going to review how we allocate ourselves 'spending money' in the future"

• "Amazing how much money gets spent that you don't remember"

• "I was left thinking that too much of my money gets spent on food and wine"

• "I am also going to 'save' more money each time I get paid and make myself live off the balance"

Emboldened, I transferred a complete summary of my own spending for the past three months to a spreadsheet and sent it off to a number of people to swap notes.

Sarah McMurray, a money coach who runs Relating To Money replied in kind with her spending. When the different household sizes were taken into account many of the categories tallied. Some were quite different.

McMurray is lucky because she regularly gets to see similar breakdowns from clients and has benchmarks she can give them. One thing that jumped out at me about McMurray's spreadsheet was her much lower power and water consumption were than mine.

When I approached Genesis Energy to ask if I was 'normal' the company had just completed an "energy usage data trial" and sadly I spend at least 7 per cent more than other households like mine.

Unsurprisingly, this article produced some very thought provoking discussions related to the narrative we build around our spending.

One parent commented about my supermarket bill that "you couldn't reduce that by much if you want to be healthy".

My take on it was quite the opposite. If I spent less our diet would probably be healthier, although McMurray's benchmarks show that I'm not doing too badly.

There are two big elephants in the room of the Kiwi shopping trolley.

One is alcohol.

The other is that everything in the trolley is an essential. It's not, and much of our supermarket shopping should be classified as entertainment, not groceries.

I've written previously about why we're off our trolleys at the supermarket and that can be found here.

A random handful of my New World receipts showed plenty of unnecessary and/or unhealthy spending such as chocolate buttons for baking, soy yoghurt and ice cream, Milo, lamb steaks, bier sticks, lunch snacks, creamy rice, and a few other unhealthy processed food items that I dare not admit in public.

The point here isn't that you can't enjoy these things, but that we're fooling ourselves over what's essential and what's not.

One working Women in Super mum with children the same age as mine set off another discussion when she said very sensibly: "I'll buy the jeans and they pay for the label."

We were on the same page until I asked how much the basic jeans for her teenagers would cost.

She said "$60 for the jeans and they pay the extra for the designer label".

My benchmark is the $29 jeans from The Warehouse, which my offspring are more than happy to own.

This difference in reality regarding the basic cost of a pair of jeans was an eye opener.

We can complain about the cost of clothing, but the reality, according to Statistics New Zealand, is that we spend far less on some categories than we did in the 1970s.

I for one remember spending $30-something on my first pair of Levis in 1978. Of every $100 spent in 1978 $9 went on clothing compared to $2.80 now.

Finally, I can really recommend pulling out your receipts and starting discussions with friends. I learned a lot from this exercise. It's not half as painful as I expected and the learnings were invaluable.