My biggest spending problem is dinning out. I love eating out because I don’t have to prepare for anything, just get in my car with some money and I’m all set. For me, buying groceries is a gigantic hassle. I have to set aside an hour of my life to walk through the aisles of some supermarket in search of food. If the store is crowded that’s even worse! My girlfriend likes to study everything in each aisle while I just want to get out. Then once we drag the food to our apartment and put everything away, we have to cook something that is worth eating. After dealing with that mess, a drive-thru seems so much more appealing.

Not only does the whole grocery shopping experience bore me to no end but my lifestyle also plays a part. I work a 9 to 5 job and then I take classes night. When I get to class, I am usually starving. Typically, I will head out before class to get something to eat or on the way home pick up something close by my apartment. On top of all this, I use food as a reward. My girlfriend and I like to go out when we have done something worth celebrating. All of these factors go into how I eat. Besides gaining weight which sadly I have, this is killing my bank account. If you estimate that we roughly spend about 5 dollars a meal out * 2 people * 30 days in a month roughly = $300. Then if you add eating out at a nicer restaurant for $50 every Saturday night, let’s say, that equals to about $200. This gives us a grand total of about $500 dollars a month. That may seem unrealistic but I have been hitting pretty close to that and it’s got to stop especially since I am losing my rental income this month.  Here are my real numbers which are quite disappointing:

While my overall spending on eating out has decreased, it looks to be on an upward surge recently! I have to stop eating out, so I devised a solution to control this situation.

My Eat At Home Solution

1.    Make a plan – To do anything in life it is best to start off with some kind of plan. I need to figure out what I want to eat and when. I will write down what meals I want for each day of the week. I am going to try doing this one week at a time at first.  Then after creating my creating a menu of meals, I need to convert that menu into a shopping list to buy those foods.
2.    Going cold turkey – I was thinking about maybe allowing us to eat out 1 time a week but I don’t think this will work for us (or at least me). I think we should go cold turkey for a while.
3.    Figure out how to make this positive – My girlfriend enjoys grocery shopping and I don’t. For whatever reason we wanted to both go together, maybe to be romantic? Now we decided it’s best if I don’t go anymore. This makes it a more positive buying experience for her and its positive for me as I don’t have to go! This won’t work if you are single but maybe you could go to the store more frequently, buying a few things at a time to make the experience less daunting. Unless of course you like to shop.
4.    Buying some prepared food – this is more expensive than buying ingredients separately and making it yourself, however, I am going from eating out a lot to eating exclusively at home and I need something that makes it easier on me.
5.     Make food on the weekends then freeze it – this may seem obvious but for someone who likes the drive thru this is going to be important, in order to break my habit. I simply don’t have a lot of time to cook on the week days. That means my girlfriend and I will have to make our food ahead of time and reheat it during the week.  I am going to use glad containers to individually package my meals for lunch. This will make it easier to take to work for lunch.
6.    The reward – normally if I did something deserving of a reward, I would go out to eat. Clearly can’t do that anymore!  If I bought myself something that would be nice but the whole point of this exercise to is save money. So I think what I will do is look at what I have saved from the month by not eating out. I will take half of that and put it into a savings account. The other half I will have earmarked for a new TV that me and my girlfriend need. This should keep me motivated to keep off of the fast-food and stick with the plan.

I’ll post an updates to see how this strategy works!