Personal Finance

My fiance and I eat out about once a week, and we often choose local places where we know we'll get 4 meals off of a $15 platter of food. It's certainly not as cheap as cooking at home, but sometimes you want a giant pile of orange chicken, and not the bother of prep/cleanup.

I used to eat out almost every night and it cost me nearly as much as my rent.

Since then, I learned some cooking, some 10-min stuff, and did a lot of personal work on emotional eating. I really tried to treat it like an addiction, learning alternatives but also, recently I moved to a less urban area where I'd have to walk 10-15mins to get decent food, when I used to have an all you can eat sushi place on my street. That helped more than anything else!

Finally, I gave myself a couple of special things: given how much I was spending on restaurants I never hesitate to spend a lot on cookware or ingredients, and when my partner comes over we often choose a cool recipe to try out, in order to prove to myself that food can be really great even if it's not made by someone else.

Now I go out for dinner only if I'm with someone, and I make sure it's always a special occasion (including a date with my partner, it doesn't have to be super special, just not "I don't feel like cooking"). It's still very hard not to go out when I'm having a tough day but I've never done so well :)

I'm going to talk about lunch.

I used to pack a lunch - nothing fancy, just a couple of sandwiches, & maybe fruit - then cook dinner, all for around $100/week. Started treating myself to bought lunches. Again nothing fancy, mostly fast-casual type places where you order at the counter & they bring your food to the table. Water not soda. Restaurant lunches are cheaper than restaurant dinners, but they're also way more calories than my packed lunches, and I found I wasn't in the mood for big dinners anymore. In the end, I was still spending around $100/week, eating out 5 days/week, and just having a snack in the evening.

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 $800~1400 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:

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.

About once a week. We're more concerned about the impact on our waist lines than our finances.

One thing we try to do to save money is to order meals for leftovers. As an example, a $14 burger will almost always be one meal, while a $14 Thai curry typically lasts for 3 meals or more. Even within specific restaurants, bowls or plates offer more bang for your buck than sandwich entrees.

We also often roast vegetables or other side dishes in the oven while waiting for delivery, mainly for health but it's also typically cheaper.