Use our quick Sufficiency Savings Estimator below to see how you can save money and contribute to building community resilience. Unlike electrification savings calculators you may have seen, you don't need to borrow thousands of dollars to unlock savings from sufficiency actions.
You can also take a deeper dive to find greater savings and opportunities to build resilience by using the more detailed, full version of the Sufficiency Savings Estimator and the Resilience Builder tools.
The Sufficiency Savings Estimator
See what six sufficiency actions could free up for your household
Your household
Where your money goes
🛍️ Buying less ✓ committed
How often does your household buy new non-essential items — clothing, homewares, gadgets?
The most powerful sufficiency action is simply not buying things to begin with. The saving shown is what you do not spend.
🥩 Red meat ✓ committed
How often does your household eat red meat (beef, lamb, pork)?
🍔 Chain takeaway ✓ committed
How often does your household order from chain restaurants or food delivery apps?
This concerns chain fast food and delivery apps — not local independent cafes and restaurants. Supporting your local businesses is a positive action!
📺 Streaming ✓ committed
How many video streaming services does your household pay for, and how many do you use weekly?
🚗 Transport ✓ committed
How many vehicles does your household run?
Wellington’s compact geography and public transport make car-lite living more achievable here than most NZ cities. Car share schemes can cover occasional trips at a fraction of ownership costs.
🌡️ Heating ✓ committed
Which of these does your household already do?
Estimates based on Wellington household data. Consumer goods: Stats NZ HES 2023. Red meat: Stats NZ HES 2023. Takeaway: estimated from typical NZ order costs vs home cooking equivalent. Transport: AA NZ, NZTA. Last updated April 2026.
Select your committed actions above to see your personalised contribution suggestion.
Where your savings could go
If your household freed up these savings, what would you most likely do with them?
Support your community
Build your Resilience Fund
🏦 Your Resilience Fund
Also from GoZero
"It'll take 50 years for us to realize that our institutions are rooted in an inaccurate understanding of the world... And that's when we will need to reinvent and recreate institutions for the human family that are rooted in ... the context of sufficiency." Buckminster Fuller, 1976.
What is Sufficiency?
According to the IPCC, sufficiency is defined as "as avoiding the demand for materials, energy, land, water and other natural resources while delivering a decent living standard for all within the planetary boundaries." For households, this means living well despite a cost of living crisis, by spending wisely on essentials and building resilience. Sufficiency is also a strategy that can be used by businesses as well as local and national governments, in deciding how to make effective use of resources and provide for the wellbeing of all.
Sufficiency First!
According to the science, we should be reducing demand through sufficiency first, before tackling efficiency and deploying renewables, otherwise any gains get swallowed up by increasing demand.
The IPCC states that "decent living standards are a set of essential material preconditions for human well-being, and include shelter, nutrition, basic amenities, health care, transportation, information, education and public space. Sufficiency addresses the issue of a fair consumption of space and resources.
Sufficiency differs from efficiency, which is about short-term technological improvements that allow doing more with less in relative terms without considering the planetary boundaries. Sufficiency is about long-term actions driven by non-technological solutions, which consume less and are determined by the biophysical processes.
Demand-side sufficiency measures have the potential to reduce global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in by 40% to 70% by 2050, yet these are not being implemented effectively. We believe that the reason for this is that market-based solutions, which dominate the climate sector, typically involve selling a technology or service that can be monetised and consumed, whereas sufficiency involves the reduction in consumption, and is therefore being ignored, despite its potential for impact."
(Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report (AR6), Working Group III report on the mitigation of climate change, published in 2022).