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Personal Finance @lemmy.ml

How often do you eat out, and does that impact your finances?

Asking the question as it seems to be a recurrent issue among finance-aware people.

Also if people have tips to save money on eating out or cooking, feel free to share!

26 comments
  • We eat out about once every 2 weeks. We used to eat out quite a bit as I got really bored of the food at home.

    I do really enjoy cooking, but its hard to come up with meal ideas. We then started getting meal kits (Gousto) and now we're really happy to eat at home as the meals are fresh, easy to cook and always different. I could get the ingredients cheaper, but its very convenient as a meal kit and theres no waste.

    Because the meal kits are very tasty, it does mean however when we do go out we find cheaper places are now poor quality, so will go somewhere nicer to eat. Still cheaper than eating out as much as we did before though!

  • We typically spend between $8001400 between two people on all food in a given month. Granted that's high, but considering that includes everything from grocery trips, meaning paper products, cat food, alcohol... one thing that was interesting for me looking at the data is our ratio of spend on eating out doesn't strongly correlate to the total we spend for the month. For instance:

    Month: May June July August (proj.)
    Groceries: $640 $500 $860 $820
    Eating Out: $250 $400 $570 $120
    Total Spend: $890 $900 $1430 $930
    Ratio (eating out/total): 28% 44% 40% 13%

    July was a super high outlier overall, but it was driven by our grocery spending more than our eating out spending. Major contributing factors were meeting friends more often than usual (four weekends of providing alcohol) and a Costco run. Our eating out generally constitutes lots of runs to e.g. Subway, Chipotle. I get a $6 coffee once a month, my wife doesn't drink coffee. We very rarely go down to sit-down restaurants and have a $50-100 meal, basically only for birthdays or anniversaries. That also hit in July (anniversary).

    Part of what's going on is I think rapidly fluctuating food prices and the fact that for the last year groceries had been so much more expensive than normal and a lot of "fast food" at least hadn't appeared to update their prices at a comparable rate. So we might be spending $10 to make a meal for two at home or $20 to eat out together. So eating out twice a week vs. once a week barely registers on a typical monthly food spend.

  • My husband and I go out for breakfast every Sunday to a small local place. It costs us $25, and it’s totally worth it. My husband also eats out on Thursdays for trivia at a dive bar where he is a regular and gets $2 rum and cokes and cheap food. That’s another $25. About once a month we will either take ourselves or our adult kids out for a nicer meal, about $150 on average. So that’s roughly $350 a month excluding special occasions and travel.

    We would be better off financially if we ate out less, but we both enjoy it tremendously. The value it adds to our life is worth the money. This is why we work.

  • I almost never eat out. I prefer home-cooked food. I'm not sure about the financial impact.

26 comments