Journal Entry – February 1, 2007 - NZD – New Zealand Dollar

Author: Pam

One of the cultural experiences that has certainly been different everywhere we have been so far is the money. In Mexico it is pesos, French Polynesia is the Pacific francs and the Cook Islands and New Zealand’s currency is the NZ dollar, made up of 100 cents. In Tonga we dealt in Pa’anga. When we arrived in NZ in November 2005 there were 5c, 10c, 20c, 50c, $1 and $2 coins and $5, $10, $20, $50 and $100 notes. They have not had a 1c coin for many years. When we arrived back in NZ in December 2006 we discovered they had abolished the 5c coin in October and are now making the 10c coin out of copper and the 20c and 50c coins are now virtually the same size, however the 20c coin has a scalloped edge to help distinguish them. The former 50c coin was very large and very heavy, I am sure it was very expensive to produce.

I find it interesting that they still price items with .99, so if an item costs $9.99 and you pay with $10.00 you receive no change. The other day we returned an item to the grocery store that cost $2.85 and was part of a larger purchase paid for with a credit card. The refund in cash was $2.80, they round down to accommodate for not having a 5c coin.

The bills are made of plastic and are all different sizes and colors. They definitely considered people who are blind and visually impaired when they designed their money. If you accidentally wash your wallet, the money comes out looking fine, perhaps just a bit cleaner.

They do not have a name for each coin, in fact we were chatting with Barbara the Marina owner’s wife and she expressed how confusing she found the names of the coins in the US. She couldn’t keep straight which was a penny versus a dime. I honestly had never even thought about the fact that the coins all have a name, some of them not obviously descriptive.
Outside the United States you use the exchange rate, the rate at which one currency can be exchanged for another to determine the value of your money in the country you are visiting. Today 1 NZD = 0.695048 USD, which means if you buy something in New Zealand it would cost .31 less than it would in the United States. The whole thing makes my brain hurt.
We have been saving coins from each country we visit. We decided we couldn’t afford to keep the bills, so from now on we will rely on photographs to refresh our memory. So far our favorite coin is a triangular two dollar coin from Rarotonga in the Cook Islands depicting a Tangaroa (a well endowed fertility god). There are so many more currencies and coinage to experience throughout the voyage!