My husband and I were working on our food budget the other night. When we do this, we include any money spent eating out. Because expenses in general are rising, we know that one way to save money is to reduce the amount that we eat out.
On the surface, this doesn’t seem like too hard to budget. We can skip the times that we go out to dinner or lunch on the weekend, but one thing that is a little harder to account for is all of the odds and ends where we find ourself eating out without really thinking that it is eating out.
For example, my daughter takes skating lessons. In between lessons, she gets hungry even if she has had lunch. So, we generally will buy some pizza. We never really allowed for this. Other times, there may be a muffin at work, a coffee at the gas station, a shake at the drive through, etc. We never consider these expenses in the food budget, but after a month they really add up.
The nice thing about considering them and tracking all of the little things is that it helps up to be purposeful about where the money in our food budget is going. We are better able to make good choices. So, when my husband offered to take all the kids along to the skating lesson so I can work this week, he packed them all lunches and snacks. That money will instead be used purposefully in the food budget.
One way that people often find success with tracking eating out and the food budget is with the envelope system. Many experts love this system, and I’ve written about it myself a few times. You basically take all of your food budget for the month in cash and place it in an envelope. Whatever money spent on food, whether it is the weekly grocery shopping or a pack of gum, comes out of the envelope. If you don’t want to carry around that much cash, you can use an envelope or a notebook to subtract money on paper from the monthly budgeted amount.