Alternatives to Dining Out
Let’s begin with a pizza. A large pizza, by the time it gets to your house along with the bottle of soda and a tip for the driver, will cost around twenty dollars. If you put it on a credit card that you don’t pay off immediately, it will cost you up to 30% in interest per year in interest on top of the original cost.
In contrast, a fresh bake-it-yourself pizza from the grocery and a 2 liter bottle of grocery store pop might be less than ten dollars. A frozen pizza and a 2 liter bottle of soda could set you back a total of five dollars.
These are the economics of dining out: you are paying for the food, the waiter, the chef, the hostess, the rent and upkeep on the building, and all the people who work at corporate headquarters. When you use the grocery store, there are fewer people on your payroll.
But dinner at home does not have to be boring. Instead of going out all the time, on one of your grocery trips, plan a few restaurant substitute meals.
One reason we go to the restaurant is that we are immediately hungry and we don’t want to wait to cook something. Yet by the time everyone makes the decision to go in the first place and then decides where to go and then piles in the car and then drives through rush hour traffic at 6 p.m., it’s at least twenty minutes. If you call for pizza, it’s a minimum of thirty minutes. In twenty or thirty minutes you can have a restaurant substitute meal cooked and served.
What are good meals of this sort?
Along with pizza, your grocery store has an amazing array of quick to fix foods, often in the freezer aisle. It might be a pan of lasagna, a quick Chinese stir fry, burritos, or one of the other many choices. Yes, these meals are more expensive than buying the ingredients and creating the meal yourself. But if you think of them as substitutes for the more expensive restaurant meal, then they are a reasonable alternative.
In addition to the grocery store, you might try one of the places where you create your own frozen meals.
You can also buy extras to dress up your restaurant-at-home meal-extra toppings or go-with-its.
Try to have on hand a couple or three alternatives for those times when you are overtired and want to have a quick meal. You can have a quick meal-without breaking the bank.
