How much could you save every month by dining in more often?
Let me be straight with you. I love to eat at restaurants. For a lot of people with demanding jobs and tight schedules, going out to eat at restaurants can practically be a way of life.
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When my wife and I go out for a casual dinner, we might spend anywhere from thirty to fifty dollars, or maybe a little bit less if we go somewhere that you order at the counter. While that might not seem like a lot of money, it is when you compare it to what it would cost us to cook at home. Let’s say we went out for a casual dinner at a bar, and the total was forty dollars after a tip. That’s ten percent of our monthly grocery budget! That amount of money is supposed to buy us food for three whole days, and it’s now been spent on a single meal! So how can you make cooking at home more appealing?
But wait! Restaurants aren’t evil!
Now, I’m not saying that you should never go out and enjoy a good time with friends, or go on a date with your significant other. I think that those things are important to do because they provide you with social interaction and some really delicious food. But what I am saying is you need to make sure that the amount of money you spend on eating at restaurants is budgeted and planned in advance, and is in line with your goals for the future. If you’re trying to pay off debt as quickly as possible, going out to eat five nights a week is a terrible strategy. A better strategy is to buy your food at the grocery store and cook it at home. A lot of you might be shaking your head, thinking “When I cook, the food just doesn’t taste good. Plus, it takes so much time!” These are the two main objections when it comes to dining in. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
Go Go Kitchen Gadget
You don’t need to be a professional chef to make great tasting food. You don’t really even need to have too much experience cooking. There are so many cooking gadgets out there, created by and for people just like you – people who want to save money by cooking at home, but aren’t great at cooking. When you cook chicken does it always come out bland, dry, and chewy? Next time you have the urge to go and spend $75 on dinner at a restaurant, do yourself a favor instead and spend $14 on a meat thermometer, $60 on an Instant Pot pressure cooker, and $1 on a container of salt. The food you cook at home will now be flavorful thanks to the salt, juicy thanks to the meat thermometer, and tender thanks to the Instant Pot. After a while, you’ll begin to prefer your own cooking to what you can get at your local pub. Let me know in the comments what some of your go-to kitchen gadgets are.
Meal Prep to the Max
In my video on grocery shopping, I talked about how we saved a bunch of money on our weekly trips to the grocery store by purchasing food in bulk rather than in small portions, and then doubling or even tripling recipes. What I didn’t go into detail about was how much time this saves every week. Instead of having to cook dinner 7 nights a week, we now cook 2 or 3 nights a week. The other nights, instead of slaving away in the kitchen after a long day at work, we simply pop a pre-portioned, pre-made meal from the other night in the microwave and within 5 minutes we’re sitting at the table with a fork in hand. That’s a whole lot faster than eating at a restaurant.
Start a Date Fund
I’m sure you can tell that my wife and I really enjoy cooking and eating at home, but we still like to go on a date every once in a while, even if it’s simply to get out of the house and do something fun together. If you still need some motivation to commit to dining in, here’s one more thing that might do the trick. Instead of adding an extra expense to the budget every month for eating at restaurants, we take the money leftover from the groceries that month and put it into a date fund that we spend on going out to dinner or seeing a movie. Sometimes, it’s the reward of being able to use that extra bit of money the following month to do something fun that motivates us to keep our grocery bills to a minimum and our cooking at home to a maximum.
So what’s your favorite meal to cook at home? Let me know in the comments.