Out of the blue, on Sunday Mrs Bob said to me “I want to go to Costco.” Gosh, I’d forgotten all about those people; when we used to live in the UK our Costco trips were a regular occurrence. Once every two or three months we would drive over to Gray’s Thurrock, a half-hour or [...]
Cost of Living – Australia
Jamie Oliver is a cheeky chappy from the UK who is well known in many parts of the world. From what I can gather, he runs about five different restaurant chains the biggest of which appears to be “Jamie’s Italian”. He has something like 35 to 40 of these restaurants in the UK and a [...]
As Christmas descends upon us it is time again to go shopping for toys; well, they don’t all come from Santa… In particular I want to compare prices between Australia and the UK. I’ve done this a few times before in previous years, notably… The Cost of Living in Australia: Buying Toys in November 2009 [...]
I was lucky enough to be given a Jawbone UP24 fitness tracker for Father’s Day the other week, an unusually expensive gift for such an occasion. I usually get a Toblerone, but as I am on my first ever diet that would have been quite a cruel gift. Under the circumstances though, a fitness tracker [...]
There was an interesting item in the news the other day which talked about the ‘Australia Tax’ which doesn’t technically exist, not officially anyway. It is used to describe the premium prices we sometimes have to pay for the same products or services simply because we are here in Australia. This is Joe Hockey, our [...]
As you probably will remember, one of our previous prime ministers, Julia Gillard, introduced the carbon tax in Australia despite promising “There will be no carbon tax under the government I lead.” On Thursday of last week, our current Prime Minister (as at the time of writing), Tony Abbott, fulfilled one of his election promises [...]
Books in Australia have always been quite expensive, I noticed that almost as soon as we arrived. I remember there was one particular book I wanted to buy a couple of years after I got here, it was available for £7.00 on Amazon in the UK but the cheapest I could find it here was [...]
Last week in my post Australia’s Bulk Billing Explained and $7 GP Fee Co-payments I talked about the current Australian Government’s plan to make a visit to the doctors more expensive. There is another proposed change the government wants to introduce which will make student fees in higher education much more expensive. The government wants [...]
