No more of this for us.
As regular readers will know I am a keen budgeter. I stretch our families income to the max and save our pennies whenever I can. However there is one area where I have been less careful, my money saving achilles heel. I love eating out! Eating out is my favourite treat , it always cheers me up. A choice of delicious foods, then someone else cooks and washes up, lovely.
However what’s not so lovely is the amount this habit is costing my family. Yesterday I went through my receipts for last month and worked out how much we spent eating out and I was shocked. Basically if we cut down our eating out every month we would save a substantial amount of money in a year. It’s easy to do, a takeaway here, a cafe lunch there and a family pub lunch at the weekend soon add up.
So my challenge to myself, and to any of my readers with the same love of lunching, is to cut down on eating out. I have the figure I spent last month and I would like to halve it this month. I will be making a note of any meals out and takeaways and will keep a running total to keep us in check.
I think the key to keeping us motivated will be to make lots of nice food at home so we don’t get bored and yearn for a treat meal. I plan on trying out some home made puddings as we all love puddings. I will also be buying the occasional pre-made pizza because it’s a still a lot cheaper than our takeaway treat and gives me a night off cooking. So whatever your usual restaurant or takeaway treat think about how you can recreate it at home because you can be sure it will cost you less.
Perhaps you’re reading this thinking about how well you already do in this area, if so share your tips I need them. If not and you also struggle with the temptation of the local Indian takeaway or pizza restaurant then join me and lets make February a cheaper month.
It is so easy to do tho. That’s where meal planning is ace
Hallo there! Here comes some advice from a grandmother who loves to eat, home and away;
Make a big stew with things you love of vegetables, qourn, beans etc… and make portions to put in the freezer. You can also eat it diferently and maybe make a “shepherds pie” or eat it with rice or pasta. You can even put it on a pizza whit lots of chees. I would recomend you to write on the portions what´s inside when I often forget to do that. My colleages at work sometimes look at me with a strange Eye when I open my frozen lunchbox with strawberries, gingerpears or appelpie. Anyhow this save me around 5 Pounds a day and I enjoy eating out on a restuarang even more when I don´t do it very often.
Well I could go on with lots of recipies as I love to Cook and bake but I´m afraid you will get boerd…..
Hi Anne, good advice thank you. I love making stew.
I do all the right things – meal plan, cook extra and freeze leftovers, always have food in but we still try and eat our every now and again.
We have a takeaway on pay day and eat out at least once or twice a month too. I know I could cut back but we enjoy it and as long as we don’t spend too much then I’m OK with it 😉
It’s a lot less than we used to spend on takeaway and eating out!
Good luck with cutting back x
Have just realised your comments got put into spam by Akismet, sorry. Yes it’s good to treat yourself sometimes.
Greetings! Very helpful advice within this post! It’s the little changes which will make the
greatest changes. Many thanks for sharing!