What’s for dinner?!?!?!
The answer to those three words is probably the single biggest controllable contributor to either bringing your FI date closer or pushing it away. This article, and others, will help you build the habits so that your answer to that question isn’t, “Let’s just go out to eat”.
Let’s compare the two options of going out to eat vs eating a meal at the house and see what kind of affect it has on our FI date.
Option 1: Going out to eat
Let’s say we go out to eat at any national food chain (Applebees, Olive Garden, Red Lobster, etc.). Below is a breakdown of the monetary cost:
| Appetizer | $8.00 |
| Drinks | $5.00 |
| Food (2 People) | $24.00 |
| Tip | $7.00 |
| Total | $44.00 |
Option 2: Eating at home
One of our go to recipes that we use at our house is an Orange Chicken Instant Pot Recipe. Below is a breakdown of the ingredients and the cost for the meal:
| Item | Recipe Calls For | Cost | Cost/Item |
| Chicken | 2.5 lbs | $1.99/lb | $4.98 |
| Sesame Oil | 1.5 tbsp = .75 FL oz | $4.10/5 oz | $0.62 |
| Orange Juice | 1.5 cups = 12 oz | $2.98/59 oz | $0.61 |
| Soy Sauce | 1/4 cup | $2.69/15 oz | $0.36 |
| Garlic | 4 cloves = .72 oz | $3.49/4.5 oz | $0.56 |
| Sugar, ginger, corn startch | Estimated | $1.00 | |
| Rice | 2 cups | $1.56/5 cups | $0.62 |
| Brocolli | 1 Head | $0.99 | $0.99 |
| Total | $9.73 |
This is enough food to create 4 well portioned meals. That means that each meal only costs $2.43 per person!
So let’s put some math behind what we have just went over. The difference between going out to eat and cooking something at the house for a family of two is $44-$4.86 = $39.14. If the average family goes out to eat twice per week then that would be a savings of $78.28 per week or $3774 per year! Now we can take that number and plug it into the SavingsPerWeek worksheet in the Engineer’s Toolbox. Assuming a modest 6% return on investment that will be a difference of $321,811 over a 30 year average working career.
Now, let’s tackle two of the major mental aspects on why people choose to go out to eat instead of making the financially sound decision of eating at home, time and energy.
Time
“I don’t have time to figure out what I’m eating then go to the store, then cook the food, then clean the dishes up.”
Some of my other articles will tackle this in length but here is a shortened version of how my wife and I blow this mental hurdle out of the water.
Scenario 1
My wife and I have a list (a cookbook) of our top 30 recipes and when deciding what to eat for the week we simply read the list and pick out a week’s worth of meals. We then spend approximately 30 minutes every Sunday night to order the food that we need for the week online. We take the 15 minute drive to the store and it is loaded up in our vehicle for us (for a $7 fee). It is then another 15 minute trip back home.
Each meal which is prepared and the cleanup of that meal takes about 45 minutes. Including the shopping time, prep time, and cleanup time my best time estimate per meal is about 1 hour 15 minutes.
The time that it takes to go out to eat will obviously vary so I will take an average of my experiences. Most of the restaurants around my house are approximately 15 minutes away. The wait time of an average restaurant is another 15 minutes. The time that it takes for the server to get food and drink orders and the food to be prepared and delivered to the table is another 30 minutes. By the time you eat, hang out to talk, and pay the bill you are looking at another 20-30 minutes.
My total estimated time to go out to eat at a restaurant is 1 hour and 30 minutes. Obviously there are many variables in this narrative and whether you make the decision to eat at home or go out to eat, once you take the average time of both scenarios neither of them proves to be better than the other.
Scenario 2
Let’s take a look at the opposite end of the spectrum where I already have the food I want to cook at the house versus I’m just going to pick up some fast food to eat.
I am still going to stick with my orange chicken meal at a cost of $2.43 per person. The time portion of this process has been reduced because I no longer have to go to the store to pick the items up. The great part about this meal is that it only takes 10 minutes of prep time and since we are using an Instant Pot we won’t have to sit there and stir the meal. The food takes 20 minutes to cook and you are ready to eat. Total = 30 minutes.
I live in the suburbs so there aren’t a lot of fast food places for me to choose from. The closest fast food chain I have to my house is a Wendy’s (8 minutes). If I want anything other than that it is another 5 minute drive. Including order time my Wendy’s trip is approximately 20 minutes and all other fast food places are 30 minutes. If you download the Wendy’s app they typically have good coupons for you to use and my wife and I can usually eat there for about $10.
In summary, the time and money portion almost equal out for our scenario #2. WAIT A MINUTE! What about lunch for tomorrow? The orange chicken, as I stated previously, created 4 meals while the fast food only created one. This results in the future action of having to go out to eat the next day and spending another $10 to eat for lunch instead of eating leftovers! Over a 30 year working career that’s about $80,000!!!
Energy
It’s Wednesday and you just arrived home from a rough day at work. You walk in and your kids are screaming and your wife is about to pull her hair out (not that this ever happens in my house). It becomes dinner time and you have the option of going out to grab a quick bite to eat at your favorite fast food restaurant or spend the time to cook a meal. Everyone is cranky and you don’t have the energy to cook a meal.
Are we going to protect our sanity by loading the kids up and grabbing a quick bite to eat? Or, with a little bit of prior preparation, do we grab the pre-made dinner in the freezer and drop it in the Instant Pot to produce a delicious meal with minimal effort? I am choosing option 2 and keeping the money in my pocket and eating healthier.
There are many times when you are juggling work and family activities and the energy to produce a healthy at home meal just isn’t possible. I don’t want to sit here and condemn going out to eat as if it was the worst thing that you could do or make you feel like you are ruining your future every time you go out to eat. But what I want you to take away from this article is the knowledge that every decision comes with an opportunity cost and there is no right or wrong answer for everyone. There are times where my wife and I are just physically and mentally exhausted and cooking dinner is just not an option. We accept the cost (time & money) of going out to eat in order to keep our sanity and don’t second guess our decision.
Take Away Points
*Making the choice to eat at home versus going out to eat can be very lucrative in the long run. Our example proved that by staying in instead of going out to eat just two times a week can save a boat load of money!
*For those times where you just don’t have any energy; buy, or make, dinners which you can store in your freezer and pull out to instantly cook.
*The decision to go out to eat doesn’t have to be black and white. There are times where going out with your friends and “getting away from it all” is the better mental decision.
*If you do choose to go out to eat you can keep costs down by not ordering an appetizer, and maybe order a water instead of your favorite pop (soda or coke for all you southerners).
*Making the sound decision of eating in is only half the battle. If you don’t invest the money that you saved and just spend it somewhere else, then you may as well just keep going out to eat.
