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I Must Confess: We Eat Out WAY TOO OFTEN!
By JLP | April 13, 2008
I spent a good portion of the weekend working on our taxes. I put it off as long as I did because I knew we were going to end up owing this year. While going through our finances, I found out something shameful:
According to my numbers, not counting trips to Starbucks, we ate out 132 times last year and spent an average of $43.41 each time for a grand total of…
We ate out 2.5 times per week last year!
There are several reasons for that massive number:
1. We were lax with our budget.
2. My wife works and she worked a lot of hours last year. In other words, I dropped ball on cooking dinner.
3. Our boys are growing and no longer eat off the kid’s menu.
4. We were without a kitchen for about 6 weeks last fall during our renovation project. We out nearly every night during those six weeks.
Anyway, my wife and I agreed that we need to put a stop to this silliness. Eating out every once in a while is okay, but not nearly $500 per month!
I haven’t run the numbers for 2008 yet but I can assure you that we will do much better the rest of this year.
Okay, now I’m curious. How badly did we do compared to AFM readers?
Topics: Budgeting | 21 Comments »
April 14th, 2008 at 1:05 am
I don’t think that’s so bad. Think about it: There are generally three meals in a day. That’s 21 meals a week, meaning that you really only ate 5/42 meals out. I think the best way to fix this would be to, rather than eating out less (which would probably end up not working out), eat at cheaper restaurants. $43.41 a meal is more expensive than a lot of good restaurants (and I don’t just mean fast food).
April 14th, 2008 at 1:11 am
I confess it’s not something I track to that level of detail; your tracking ability is impressive!
It’s sparked my curiosity though. I think I’ll track all eating out for the month of May to see just how much I spend, and decide if I want to continue tracking to the cent after that.
April 14th, 2008 at 6:43 am
I have always liked to consider that eating out is partially subsidized entertainment. It isn’t quite the full price because you’d have paid something to cook at home. And the fancier you cook at home, the more that would cost. You’d have spent perhaps 1/5 of that amount on groceries anyway.
One way to help take a dent out of the amount without taking away too much of the fun is to convert some of that to carry out. If you carry out, you generally don’t pay for drinks, don’t tip a waitress, and don’t tip a driver. But you still get the fun of the varied menu.
April 14th, 2008 at 7:06 am
We budget $50 per month for eating out, but we can dip into our individual spendable accounts to pay for a special meal. I’d say we spend $1000 max each year (for two).
April 14th, 2008 at 7:50 am
I spend over $12,000 every year on eating out …
April 14th, 2008 at 8:16 am
My wife and I have a huge social circle and eating out is our recreational activity. We’ve spent over $800 this year (I checked as of this morning) on eating out. Having said that, we’re less than a month away from having our first baby. I expect eating out to go dramatically down.
April 14th, 2008 at 8:18 am
Yeah, I think my boyfriend and I have you beat. But we’re “foodies,” and we cut out other expenses to afford a few (very) nice meals each month.
BTW, I think Observation of Life is not completely right when s/he says that $43.41 is more expensive than a lot of good restaurants. In New York City, for example, that might be standard for 2 people at a mediocre restaurant. If you wanted a great meal, you might have to pay $100-$200 as a couple.
April 14th, 2008 at 8:35 am
We have a monthly budget for dining out dinners of $200 and lunch of $100. We’ve stuck to those numbers fairly well so that’s about $3600 last year.
One way we’ve taken control is that we only allow ourselves to eat out on Fri-Sun, no weekdays. Our lunch budget is for me at work because honestly I like to get out of the office and try different things sometimes. Other than that, we just eat in on weekday nights.
April 14th, 2008 at 9:42 am
I just checked my Mint and it says for the past six months I’ve spent $1585 on restaurants alone. So double that for a year and then, since my beau and I usually split dinner evenly, double it again. So yeah, about the same as you for two people. But I don’t know, I work such long hours and don’t often feel like doing anything for dinner. Plus it’s our hobby (we’re big into the restaurant scene.) We don’t really spend much on anything else. I just recently read something about the 5-percent rule, and how our lives tend to revolve around big “events” that we save our money for – vacation, wedding, etc. meaning that we spend upwards of 95% of our life in “wistful anticipation.” Just thought that was an interesting thing to point out.
April 14th, 2008 at 9:57 am
We spend between $400-500 out a month for the two of us. I caveat that however, with the fact that going out for drinks is included in that. Any time that I see a bar OR a restaurant I include it in the eating out category.
This is mostly because if we go out for drinks, it is normally happy hour and we eat at the same time. It also ends up bringing down the amount we spend on entertainment.
As Lily stated, $40 is a normal quick meal for two in some areas, such as DC. $10-$15 for an entree and a drink or two each plus tip and it adds up quickly. And normally we end up having a nice evening out once a month, which typically runs at least $100.
April 14th, 2008 at 10:02 am
An average of $43 per dinner for a family of 5 isn’t too bad. The bulk of our eating out is at two places:
a locally-owned Mexican restaurant, and
Buffalo Wild Wings
Those two places alone accounted for over 50 of eating out trips.
April 14th, 2008 at 10:12 am
This is definitely an area we consistently struggle with. It has definitely come down year to year over the last 3 years, but 2007’s total was $7561, or $630/month. For Jan – March 2008, we are at $413/month, so we’ve made some strides to keep a better handle on this. We also use dining out as our “social/entertainment”, and it’s an area we enjoy, so it will never be very low, but we will continue to at least try to keep it within budget. For 2007 it was 7% of our budget, we’ll aim for 5 – 6% this year.
April 14th, 2008 at 10:14 am
Guess I should also mention we are a family of 5, with 3 being boys age 16, 19, and 22 (so our grocery tab is outrageous as well!)
April 14th, 2008 at 10:40 am
I’ve been tracking every penny spent for years, according to categories. I don’t have “eating out” as a category, but include it in Miscellaneous. We’ve spent $756.44 over the last 6 months in this category, which includes clothing, accessories like belts and little unnecessary things like car bumper stickers, and eating out. This is for two people.
April 14th, 2008 at 12:34 pm
For an entire family that is not a bad number, especially considering that your kitchen was out of commission for six weeks. Our family enjoys eating at home (and from our garden), so when we do eat out, it is extremely rare. I myself go out to eat with friends, but I’d say I spend maybe $40-60 a month eating out.
April 14th, 2008 at 1:10 pm
Thats nothing.
We are both resident physicians. We have no time to cook. We probably eat out 5 times a week a 40 bucks a pop. Also we get a nice hotel room once a month (400 bucks) + dinner (120). I bet we spend at least 500 a month on food. Again, we don’t spend our money on anything else cause we don’t have time!
April 14th, 2008 at 5:36 pm
I just checked Mint, and I’ve spent $2,116 at restaurants over the last 7 months – $302/mo on average.
But that doesn’t count all the meals where my BF paid for both of us (I’d treat too, but usually he got the dinners and I picked up lunches, so he spent more).
It also doesn’t count $521 ($74/mo) on “fast food” which includes “to go” orders and takeout.
Incidentally that’s $376/mo – only ONE DOLLAR OFF my $375 eating out budget, which I thought I rarely stuck to. Nice!
April 15th, 2008 at 8:18 am
JLP,
is this dinner only or lunch+dinner?
April 15th, 2008 at 8:30 am
Pal,
Dinner only.
April 17th, 2008 at 12:19 am
I use Quicken to track my finances and I discovered that eating out and buying coffee out were my “latte factor”. One way I have found to save money is this: my friends and I skip eating out and instead have a potluck dinner with a video. We either use Netflix (fixed price per month) or I get DVD’s free from the public library.
June 14th, 2008 at 7:02 pm
$50/month. But, my motto is that I’d rather buy “instant” food that I really like than eat out. So I spend $250 for one person on food at the grocery store, by buying things like smoked salmon, strawberries, lettuce year-round, Greek yogurt…