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Mar 12, 2010

Unnecessary Expenses: Part 5 (Merrick)

I’ve blogged about it before, but I’ll blog about it again. Eating out is an unnecessary expense.

Unless you’re only eating off the $.99 menu at McDonalds or Wendy’s, chances are you’re dropping a significant amount of money for your meal and a tip every time you go out to eat. It is obviously a luxury to eat out once or twice a week, and if you’re looking for place to cut back, this is a good one. And I don’t know about you, but half the time I go out to eat, I end up ordering something only sub-par and I walk away thinking, “too bad I just spent $15.00 on that meal that I didn’t really LOVE.”

I’ve been reading The $5 Dinner Mom Cookbook, and have recently started integrating her meals into my weekly menus. She breaks down the cost of each item in each meal, including side dishes, and every meal costs less than $5 (and each makes enough for a family of five). After I’ve finished this book, I’ll blog about it a little more in-depth, but for now, suffice it to say that feeding your entire family for $5 is pretty great compared to the $50 or more you would spend taking them all out to eat. That means you could feed your family for one and a half weeks for the same price as one meal at a restaurant!

So although eating out can be fun and a good break for us wives who cook on a nightly basis for their families, it is obviously an unnecessary expense. Huge amounts of money can be saved if you limit your eating out to once or twice a month and instead eat at home, using recipes that can feed the whole family for only a few dollars.

4 comments:

Sherry said...

I am one of those people who LOVES eating out. We have an eating out portion of our budget. But when we need to cut back and want to focus on saving, eating out is one of the first things that gets dropped.

Chelsea said...

One of the good things about Japan is no tipping or taxing. We like to eat out at home too. $5 per meal kind of worries me. What kind of quality is in the $5. Are we talking casseroles and spaghetti?

Unknown said...

Chelsea: I was a little dubious of the $5 dinners, thinking it would all be spaghetti and casseroles too. But somehow it's not! I will do a big post (or several) on the cookbook and let you know more then. But for now, suffice it to say I made one of the meals the other night and Philip said it made his list of top ten favorite meals!

Meg said...

LOVE this blog! I'm so happy I found it, as I am a newly wed. We're expecting our first child any day now (literally) and really want to bring in our finances to live comfortably and not pay check to pay check like the rest of our family.