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The big car has been parked up and everyone now squeezes into mum's small hatchback, as the McAllister-Sim family from West Auckland cut back to cope with soaring living costs.
Geoff Sim and Davina McAllister-Sim used to take two cars in from Massey to Auckland City Hospital, where
they work as nurses, because they finished at different times.
When the cost of filling up their bigger car passed $100 in the past fortnight, the family decided to leave it at home. They now drive in together in their smaller car and Mr Sim bikes home two or three nights a week.
"It's only 50 minutes. There's a cycleway beside the motorway," he said. "We have decided just to use one car at the moment and we're still deciding, do we sell the other car and run off one, or have two just in case?"
Despite a joint income of $130,000 before tax, the couple still rent a four-bedroom house in Massey at $450 a week and have given up plans to buy in the city, at least for now.
"We want to come to town, but at the moment the cost of that is too much, so it's a choice that we have made to stay," said Mrs McAllister-Sim.
They have three children and have chosen to economise on other things to pay for their eldest son, Kian, 5, to attend an independent school.
Second son Zachary, 3, and daughter Niamh, 2, go to an early childhood centre at the hospital. The fees have just gone up to $250 a week for Niamh and $122 for Zachary, who qualifies for 20 free hours a week.
Mr Sim was unsure how much the family's food bills have risen - "apart from nearly dying of a heart attack after our last food shop".
But Mrs McAllister-Sim stopped buying cheese when the price hit $15 a kilo, and Mr Sim said the family had become bargain-hunters.
"We are shopping around more than we used to, so instead of going to Foodtown we'd get some [fruit and vegetables] from the local food shop, some [meat] from the Mad Butcher - just consciously thinking we'll get this here and that there."
They have turned off their three electric heaters.
"On Tuesday we were thinking the house is cold, and I did make a conscious decision that we would use the gas burner instead of the power," Mrs McAllister-Sim said. "I don't buy magazines any more. Even $4.50 is a bottle of milk.
"We make other sacrifices, like we wouldn't have coffee out or coffee at work. We don't buy our lunches as much - I couldn't anyway, but Geoff used to. Now he takes sandwiches and Weet-Bix.
"We are not doing big trips. We haven't driven out of Auckland for a very long time as the price [of petrol] keeps going higher and higher."
Instead, the family have joined the zoo and the museum "so we can go as much as we like".
"That was something else we looked at," Mrs McAllister-Sim said. "We looked for what we could do with the kids that wouldn't cost too much money."
