Our goal for the next 3 years is to pay off our house.
We are completely debt free except for our mortgage, and we are putting everything extra we have back into principal payments every year.
The reason why is a little bit of a story, and something I will share soon! However, all of that being said, we are ALWAYS looking for ways to save money.
I have spent hours on the phone with insurance companies trying to negotiate better rates for our home and auto policies, budget meal planning is what I live and breath, and we’re always looking for fun and FREE activities to do as a family!
You name the money saving venture, you can bet that we’ve done it!
We first got serious about paying off our mortgage about 6 months after we took it out in 2018. I began taking a good look at our spending every month, and it was obvious we had an achilles heel.
Both me and my husband are savers by nature. We don’t love to spend money, and if we can not buy something, we usually go with that.
However, we both LOVE eating out.
We LOVE date nights, we LOVE take out, and we LOVE little treats. It’s more of an experience thing for us.
Some people get a rush from going on a shopping spree or running a marathon. We felt that by running through Panera Bread to get salads for dinner. Or by going out while the kids are with a grandparent and eating a meal together.
There’s nothing bad about eating out, we enjoy it so much! It was just where we figured out a TON of our money was going without ever realizing it every single month.
The thing was, we didn’t even eat out “that much”.
Clay didn’t eat out for lunch while at work. He came home and ate quickly.
We didn’t get take out regularly, maybe just once a week.
I didn’t go through a coffee shop and get a $5 latte every morning.
It felt like we were doing good, because we weren’t doing the money spending things that so many of our peers were doing.
You know the idea that just because you’re doing better than you’re neighbor doesn’t mean you’re doing all that well.
Yeah, that totally applied to us.
We looked around and thought, “Hey, we’re not in debt, we aren’t eating out every day. We’re doing good!”
I guess in principal we were doing well, but was keeping up with our eating out habit helping us reach our family goals?
Nope.
In fact, it was a big hindrance to them!
So, that brings us to the simple and easy way to save $1500 a year.
Eat out only once a week.
Now, we were consistently eating out or getting takeout twice a week whenever we made this change.
Someone who is eating out 4 or 5 meals a week will save EVEN MORE!
We quit eating out just one time a week and we saved about $30 a week.
$30 a week multiplied by 52 weeks…$1560.
That’s it.
We didn’t set an unrealistic goal that would make us miserable.
Eating out and going on dates is extremely live giving for us! We knew we didn’t need to cut it out entirely simply for quality of life purposes.
Just cutting it down to once a week saved us a lot of money and still gave us the joy of going out on a date or getting take out sometimes.
By not doing it so regularly, it’s really something that I enjoy and appreciate more now!
Not to mention, it’s much healthier, and sets a better example for our children for us to almost always eat at home.
How much money can you save by cutting down the number of meals you eat out?
If you eat out as a family 5 times a week, you may be spending around $8000 a year at restaurants. Cut that down to once a week, and you could SAVE over $6000.
4 times a week, you could save almost $5000!
It really adds up quickly.
What could you do with an extra $1500 every year?