When I was young, we saw home brands such as Pams and No Frills as the killjoy of the supermarket. Lurking on the shelves, waiting for an opportunity to sneak into the trolley and ruin your meal, if not your day. Pams – yucky! No Frills – disgusting! “Muuuu-uuuum! Why would you do this to us?!”

My aversion to home brands started with a bad can of baked beans (it tasted like liquid detergent), and that’s a tough thing to recover from. I always saw home brand products as substandard, something that wouldn’t work as well as the ‘real’ thing.

Times have changed and as a moderately sensible adult I now realise just how much money home brand products can slice off your weekly food bill. I’m a home brand fiend, but I don’t even come close to some people I know, including one woman who uses the men’s shaving foam to shave her legs.

So it’s good news to hear that it’s been academically proven that smart people buy home brand products. In a 2014 paper Do pharmacists buy Bayer? Informed shoppers and the brand premium, researchers found that ‘informed’ shoppers are more likely than regular consumers to take advantage of home brand products. Unbelievably, if US consumers switched to home brand products whenever possible, they would collectively spend US$44b less annually.

And right here in New Zealand, when Countdown dropped the price of its Homebrand bread to $1 a loaf, Kiwi consumers saved $9 million in a year.

When it comes down to it, home brand is the best deal a shopper can get. Let’s look at five staple products in most Kiwi kitchens and what the price difference is.

1. 3kg bag of white sugar. I can hear the sirens of the paleo police screaming in the distance. Woolworths Essentials, $5. Chelsea White Sugar, $7.39. Pams White Sugar, $5.39. Save $2.39.
2. 1.25-1.5kg bag of plain flour. All the better for making those scones. Woolworths Essentials 1.5kg plain flour, $1.79. Champion Standard Flour 1.5kg, $3.29. Edmonds Standard Flour 1.25kg, $3. Pams Pure Plain Flour 1.5kg, $1.79. Save $1.50.
3. 1 x 400g tin of diced tomatoes. Bolognaise here we come! Pams Diced Plain Tomatoes, $1.10. Homebrand Diced Tomatoes, $0.80. Select Diced Tomatoes, $1.10. Watties Chopped Tomatoes, $2.09. Delmaine Crushed Tomatoes, $1.89. Save $1.29.
4. 2 litre blue top milk. Hello, ‘value add’. Signature Range, $3.70. Anchor Milk, $4.22. Fresh Valley A2, $4.90. Homebrand, $3.19. And the real sinner: Lewis Road Creamery Hipster Milk, 1.5 litres including pretty packaging for $5.50. Save $2.31.
5. 570-580g tomato sauce. Fun for the whole family! Greggs 570g, $3.60. Homebrand 575g, $1.60. Watties refill can 575g, $3.39. Delmaine 580g, $3.99. Save $2.39.

If you bought the cheapest of each one of these instead of the most expensive fancy-pants brand option, you’d save nearly $9.88 just on these five products alone – an average of nearly $2 per product. Buy five home brand products every week and in a year you’d have $513 left over in your fun fund. Let me repeat: you’d have $513 extra in your pocket. 

Think home brand products only come in the staple categories? Think again. We scouted around and found home brand products for all of these odd things and more: Chocolate Bavarian dessert, 4 litres of motor oil, denture cleaning tablets, glacé cherries, chocolate spread, chest rub ointment, garden bark and fish food granules. Put all those together and you’ve got a party people will be talking about for years to come. 

So go for it. Fill your boots. Take the home brand challenge, and own that $513.

The post How much Pams is in your pantry? Homebrand can save you heaps appeared first on Credit Simple NZ.

It can be a dry old topic, personal finance, and it can sometimes inspire feelings of sadness due to one’s lack of savings, which is why I used to imagine it might be more fun to work in in banking pocketing ludicrous bonuses for throwing around other people’s money while sustaining a truly ludicrous social life possibly due to illicit substances.

Unfortunately, I have since worked for a bank and I didn’t once get to roll around in piles of dosh that belonged to other people while quaffing champagne at 2pm on a yacht. Très disappointing.

So, over the years I have been forced to look at other ways to improve my financial situation – and fortunately for you, my chums, today I deign to share some of these tips with you. 

1. Never drink your rent (also applies to mortgages)
A family member (who shall not be named) told me this the year I went flatting, I assume based on his own painful experience. If you’re reading this thinking ‘who would be so stupid as to drink their rent’ then I think you’re underestimating the lure of more booze to an already intoxicated person having a really good night out. All logic goes out the window and straight to the bar. I have danced perilously close to this cliff edge on a number of occasions and it is only a) the voice of reason and b) the knowledge various flatmates would fill my bed with drawing pins if I failed to pay rent that stopped me from toppling over the ravine and into the valley of total destitution from whence no rent can be paid.

2. Always take your lunch on your first day
I am actually a keen follower of the ‘always take your lunch’ school of thought – not just on your first day (although this is good if it turns out you work in a wasteland with nothing but fried badger available). It might seem naff to some but if you’re spending $10 a day on snackery, then that’s $50 a week you don’t have for stamp collecting or pet food for Captain Waffles. No one likes making lunch or having to think about making lunch which is why I personally always cook too much for dinner and take that instead. And there is the pleasure of watching your colleagues venture into the rain to purchase a luncheon probably quite high in saturated fats while you’re sitting pretty scoffing last night’s pasta surprise which tastes both free and surprisingly good the next day.

3. If it’s cold, volunteer to cook or do the dishes
This depends a little on your living situation, but if you’re cold, with limited heating and you can’t afford more, you’re wearing all your merino and you’re still shivering, then cook. And if you can’t cook because it’s someone else’s turn and they will not relinquish the saucepans, then once you have eaten said warm meal – do the dishes.  If you don’t want to be caught using your hairdryer as a personal heater, destroying the power bill in the process and attracting the wrath of those you live with and incurring a bed full of drawing pins, then run a sink full of hot water and get stuck in.

4. Save 10% of your pay regardless of how little it is
I was fairly useless at this until quite recently. Particularly when I was in my twenties. If I had a goal to save for (like a plane ticket to somewhere way more interesting) then I was fine. If I was just supposed to be just saving for whatever, e.g. a rainy day (weirdest thing to save for, right), then yeah, nah.

5. Claim for stuff at tax time – legitimate stuff, of course
For many years, I had little understanding of how you should best do your tax return, probably because I was too busy not drinking my rent and doing dishes instead. But if you’ve made donations over $5 you can claim tax credits, and if you’re self-employed or work from home, you can claim on your expenses – but keep in mind you will have to prove all this so this is not the time to use your imagination and claim you have a home office with all the trimmings when you actually work from your bed.

The above certainly isn’t rocket science probably because I’m not a rocket scientist but it’s been surprisingly useful and kept those wolves from the door (I have no idea why they’d be there in the first place) so ignore it at your peril.

The post Never drink your rent (and other sensible life advice) appeared first on Credit Simple NZ.