Money Saving Tip #5: UP TO $3,960 SAVINGS PER YEAR --- Eat at home more often

This one really should be a no-brainer, but I'm throwing it in anyway. That once a week, $30 - $50 splurge you have at the local eatery could be CUT. Sure, you need to buy groceries to make a meal, but I can guarantee that restaurants are NOT staying in business by charging you exactly what it costs to make the meal.

My FAVORITE food to eat out is Tex-Mex. LOVE IT! But it is really expensive, not to mention really mean to the waist-line, especially when you're not in control of how the food is prepared.

I LOVE this restaurant that makes these AWESOME cheese burritos. Beans, cheese, sour cream, and a flour tortilla, with just a bit of tomatillo sauce. SOOO good. I practiced and learned to make this same meal at home. I was paying $8.99 plus tax and tip, rounded out to about $12.00. By making my own beans, my own flour tortilla, and purchasing the sour cream, a can of tomatillo sauce and cheese (not using all of these ingredients on one burrito), I made the same cheese burrito for about $1.50, as an overestimate.

For three of us to eat the same burrito out, we pay $36.
At home, $5.


Truly, we LOVE to eat out, though. So instead of cutting this out altogether, we just cut back. Instead of going out every weekend, I learned to make some of this yummy stuff at home, and now we have a once a month splurge of eating out together as a family.

And don't even get me started out HOW MUCH YOU NEED TO RETHINK EATING FAST FOOD. Fast food = fast death. 'Nuff said.


For my family, we'll go on the lower end of the $30-$50 estimate. We were spending $30 once per week and cut that down to once per month. We went from $120 to $30 on eating out. Since all months aren't created equally with varying numbers of weeks, we'll look at this differently. We were spending $1,560 eat out per year ($30 X 52 weeks). Now, we're spending $360 ($30 X 12 months). That's a $1,200 difference, divided by 12 months, an average of $100 per month saved. In my house, that's an entire weeks worth of groceries!

Hey - a little side note: If you're spending $1,560 eating out per year, you're spending $15,600 in ten years. By the time your child is old enough to go to college, you've eaten through the entire college fund, at $28,080 in 18 years. Sorry, little guy, you can't go to college because we ate out every week.

But in all fairness, you do have to replace that meal with groceries. So, then let's say that you are paying a 66.6% mark up on the meal. For a $30 meal out, you would only need about $10 to eat that meal at home. So, you're still saving $70 per month from the $100 per month calculation from above.



Where are we now with monthly savings?
Tip#1 - Dish Towels $5 per month
Tip#2 - Dump Cable $92 per month
Tip#3 - Homemade Goodness $24 per month
Tip#4 - Esurance.com $139
Tip#5 - Eat at home $70
Total per month: $330
Total per year: $3,960



I have actually used recipes from these books. Good stuff!!!