Maxime Meiland is ‘very different in life’ now that she has been on welfare for a month for the TV show Chateau Bijstand. “There are cookies in our drawers and I no longer throw them away.”
For years she has been accused of being extremely spoiled: Maxime Meiland. It is not for nothing that she is the least popular member of the family. Yet she also has a leading role in the upcoming Meiland series on SBS 6. In Chateau Bijstand she and her parents try to get by on social assistance for a month.
Old cookies
That month in Uithoorn changed her whole life, says Maxime in the Weekend. “I look at life differently now. That sounds a bit dramatic, but it makes you think about certain things differently now.”
What then? “I think we have a lot of excess at home, for example. People only buy because you feel like something. We always have cookies in our drawers, but if we feel like stroopwafels and there aren’t any, we go to the bakery. Then the rest is thrown away, because it gets old.”
Ridiculous
Maxime’s life has now changed so much that she just leaves those cookies in the drawer and doesn’t throw them away anymore. “I’m really done with that, I think that’s a waste of money. And it’s really just ridiculous.”
Maxime could have used that turnaround a bit sooner. She just bought a bigger house because she has so many things. Price tag? 1.2 million euros. “This amount is really the max for us. I wouldn’t have thought we’d be able to afford it at all.”