I used to be a McDonalds junkie. According to the video “Super Size Me“, McDonalds would have considered me a heavy-consumer, frequenting a McDonalds restaurant more than 3 times a month. Fortunately for my budget (and health!) I’ve reduced my eating out habit to almost nil. One of the most common budget-breakers is eating out too often. This occurs for a number of reasons.
- We make ourselves so busy, we can’t (or won’t) find the time to prepare a quality meal.
- We don’t grocery shop and meal plan very well so we end up with lots of the same thing night after night. Eventually we get same-meal fatigue and want to eat-out for variety.
- We are either too tired or lazy to prepare a meal. Even if we have the time, we’d rather watch TV, or do a myriad of other things.
Below is a graph of dollars spent on eating out (in Canada) from 1990 to 2004. Clearly the trend has been increasing. Judge for yourself where you stand.
Because I’ve been using CalendarBudget to track my finances since 2002, I can calculate exactly how much I would have saved by not eating at McDonalds … a whoping $965.82! If I had invested this money, it would be worth almost $2000 today.
How much money would you save if you didn’t eat out so often?
