Inside: It’s way easier to get takeout than to cook at home – but it adds up. These tips will help you kick your dining out addiction once and for all!
I have another confession to make…before we started managing our money better, me and my husband used to spend $800 per month on dining out. And that was even after spending $675 per month on groceries! Between the two of us, we were each literally eating away $24 every day.
Things were getting dire with our financial picture and we needed a drastic (and sustainable) change, especially to deal with our dining out addiction. Over time, we’ve developed a plan that has helped us successfully kick the habit. We’re not perfect, but I’m happy to say it’s been working great—we eat out less, we have more money, and when we do eat out, we enjoy it more.
Here’s how we did it.
Contents
Develop A Plan
Everyone becomes addicted to dining out for different reasons. I could describe to you my plan (and I will), but for this to be successful for you, you need to tailor the solution to fit your situation.
The steps to do this are simple. It’s actually doing them that’s a bit trickier:
- Identify the reasons why you’re eating out so much.
- Brainstorm and test different ideas to combat each of those reasons.
Step One: Identify Reasons Why You’re Dining Out So Much
In our case, we ate out for three main reasons:
- Convenience
We just didn’t want to cook, especially at the end of a long day.
- Discussion time
It’s easier to have honest discussions in a restaurant than at home sitting across the living room from each other. We don’t have room in our tiny apartment for a table, there’s dishes to do, the dog is chasing the cat around, there’s several precarious stacks of mail piled up, the TV is on, etc…
- Palatability
I am not a good cook, and because we don’t have space for a grill or a deep fryer, I can’t cook a lot of things even if I wanted to.
Related post: Come To The Dark Side: How To Get Your S.O. On Board With Managing Finances
Step Two: Brainstorm And Try Methods To Deal With Each Of These Problems
Convenience
We came up with five main ways to make it easier and more convenient for us to cook. Now, it’s almost more of a hassle to go out and buy food rather than make it at home.
- We collect recipes like a fiend (no more wondering what I can make).
- We plan our meals each week (no more puttering around wondering what to make, and I draft up a shopping list so I have all the stuff on hand already).
- We learned how to make cooking a more stress-free process.
- We do a lot of freezer cooking, which save lots of money and frees up time during the week
- We always have a go-to easy meal on hand (spaghetti) for if we really don’t feel like cooking after a long day.
Related: Magnetic Weekly Meal Planner And Grocery List (affiliate link)
Discussion Time
Instead of relying on expensive dinners to allow us to have good conversations, I’m trying to make more of an effort to have real discussions with my husband every day. We’re also making more time to do things at home for cheap, like playing board and card games. This has been a great substitute for conversations at expensive restaurant tables!
Palatability
Quite simply, I’m learning how to cook better by experimenting with new methods and taking online cooking classes from sites like Craftsy. I’ve found that I’m not nearly as bad a cook as I thought I was—I had only been using that as an excuse to justify my expensive habits.
I’ve also found workarounds for some of the things we don’t have: we might not have room for a real grill, but we do have room for a George Foreman grill! It’s almost the same thing.
How To Stay Successful In Battling A Dining Out Addiction
Aside from the strategy above to isolate and solve the reasons you’re addicted to dining out, I’ve found it’s helpful to focus on a few other things.
- Calculate how much you will save by eating more at home. Compare expenses before and after making these changes.
- Calculate how much your dining out habit actually cost you in terms of hours of your life.
- How much faster will you be able to reach your financial goals by eating at home?
- Realize that once you meet your financial goals, you can go out to eat more if you like.
via GIPHY
How We’ve Fared In Our Battle Against Our Dining Out Addiction
I’m happy to say that we’ve been very successful in curbing our dining out battle. It’s been a year since we’ve reduced our spending from $800/month down to its current value, around $200/month.
We temporarily decided to bump it up to $450 a few months ago to allow us to have more date nights (with discussion time!), but we’ve since reigned it back in again and are focusing on cheaper activities that we can do together.
I’m not gonna lie: it hasn’t been easy. At the same time, it hasn’t been as difficult as I expected it would be. I miss dining out all the time, but what I like even better is making measurable progress towards my financial goals.
Since kicking the habit, we’ve managed to break the paycheck-to-paycheck cycle and are now making real progress towards our other goals, like building up an emergency savings fund and paying off debt. And that’s more important to me than any cheeseburger.
Have you struggled with an dining out addiction? How did you break it? Leave a comment below!
The amount my partner and I have spent on eating out is obscene. We haven’t kicked the habit entirely, but we are getting good at reining it in. We’ve tried a lot of the same strategies as you- planning, keeping a list of foods we like, etc. I try to freeze extra portions so that we have them for future meals. When we do go out we try to share an entree. It’s usually just enough food for the both of us, is less expensive and we still get the good time feeling of going out.
Freezing/saving extra portions is a great tip. Most recipes are scaled to 4 servings, but if you just have 2 people in your house, it makes dinner AND lunch leftovers for the next day! I wish I could share an entree with my husband…but he weighs like twice as much as me and eats way more (he’s about a foot taller – it’s understandable).
When my wife and I did our first budget I guessed that we had spent $100 eating out the previous month.
After adding it up it turned out to be $450!!!! Holy cow! I was pissed.
We keep it to around $100/mo now and have been for 5 years. That’s a lot of savings right there.
Eating out too much will crush your finances.
I know the surprise, ha! We guessed maybe $300/month when we did our first budget – not!
I want to say that I spend like $450 per month dining out just for me. It’s a little ridiculous. I totally need to try some online cooking classes. Is there one in particular that has been the most helpful?
I really like Crafty’s classes (link above in this post). They have a lot of great free ones, like how to properly chop vegetables like chefs (I was doing it wrong the WHOLE time! lol) and a lot of great paid ones. They run huge sales on them like all the time, so if you want to take a class and it’s not on sale, just wait a month or two. They’re especially helpful for newbies because they show you how to cook recipes, but they also show you the principles of particular cooking methods, so you know how to apply what you’ve learned from those recipes to new dishes. They teach you skills, not just recipes, basically.
Also, I really love Erin Chase’s Freezeasy meals (link above; freezer cooking) because they don’t require any skill at all. Just dump ingredients in the bag according to the recipe, freeze it, and when you’re ready to cook, pop it out and into a crock pot. Simple and easy. I have a Pinterest board too just for free freezer cooking recipes: https://www.pinterest.com/notoriousdebt/freezer-cooking/. Hope that helps! 🙂
Eating out is the big leaky hole in my budget bucket. On top of being expensive it’s usually unhealthy as well 🙁
I love your strategy and am going to make a concerted effort to reduce my expenses, and my waistline, by adapting it to fit my situation. Thanks for the motivation!
I’m so glad you liked the post! You’re right; most restaurant food is really unhealthy. I also work out at home too, but since cutting dining out of our budget so much, I’ve definitely noticed a difference in my health. I’ve never been a large person per se, but I was definitely starting to pack on the pounds when I was eating out more.
Ha ha! My husband and I went through this a few years ago. We freaked out when we realized we were spending about $600/mos on eating out. And it wasn’t even great dining.It was mostly beer and wings! We’ve cut back a lot since. We really like eating out, so eliminating it was never an option. Some weeks we don’t eat out at all, but most weeks only once, sometimes twice. But we manage to stay between $100-$300 now. We use dining coupons whenever possible and if we want to go some place really swanky, we plan in advance and try to cut back to make up for it. I’ve been experimenting with cooking more at home. Most everything I make is stuff that cooks quick – I don’t have time to labor in the kitchen. And I make extras – cooking to get a measly 4 servings is not worth my time in the kitchen. Tuesday nights we’ve been celebrating Taco Tuesdays at home. I usually get ground beef or chicken and we’ll make tacos. It’s become a big deal for us. We even saved a Pandora station with Mariachi music that we turn on for this 🙂 The key is to make it fast and make it fun!
Hey, don’t knock the beer and wings! (although $600 per month on them is a bit excessive, I agree! 🙂 )
YAAAASSSS, you’ve done a ton of stuff to save money, well done! We can’t eliminate eating out altogether either – some people do, but that just doesn’t work for us. But like you, we cook more at home now, we make 4 servings of everything so we have leftovers for lunch the next day, and we make simple stuff.
Mariachi music is a great idea! I’ll have to try that next time we’re cooking together. Love it!! 🙂