We stopped eating out as much as we used to due to our calorie budget. It wasn’t the calorie budget alone that made us stop going out. The rising costs of eating out became apparent to us as we were resetting our financial goals. While an odd way to think about it, the value of eating out vs. in tipped in favor of in. It didn’t mean we would never eat out but it did mean we had to put a quantifiable value on both eating in and out to help guide us. In this post, we discuss the why, what, and how of that budget.
Background
We had learned to cook for ourselves and over time we began to like our food better than the restaurants. It wasn’t that we didn’t enjoy a great taco or fried chicken, but rather, it was no longer an event. Eating out became a thing we needed when we traveled or needed a break from our home kitchen.
This shift also caused us to rethink some of our social activities. We would often go out with friends rather than stay in. This happened a lot if we gathered at our recreational property. Part of our traditions was to go to a restaurant in town rather than cook. We had seen it as a time saver and fun. Our calorie budget and financial choices changed that for us.
Also, note that this post will introduce many concepts. We will provide more in-depth explanations in later posts.
The Why of the Budget
We wanted a way to justify eating in or out in a simple way. Whether eating out or in, you have so many ways you can spend money. When eating out you can choose a fine dining venue or the local gas station hot case. When eating in you can choose to cook a high-end brand name or a more generic product. Unfortunately, these are both qualifiers and value judgments. We wanted something more concrete as a value quantifier to take the emotion out of our decisions.
The What of the Budget
Money may be the root of all evil but it is also a simple quantifier. Time, which waits for no person, is also a simple quantifier. Very few people have unlimited money and nobody has unlimited time. We decided to use these two as our guiding principles when making food choices. These two constrained the overall choices we could make to something logical over emotional.
We decided we needed to factor in the total number of portions. Why factor it in? Because the number of portions is directly related to the investment of time and money in cooking. Many dishes make multiple portions however, some like lasagna come at a high time cost. We will discuss that later on in this article.
The How of the Budget
We tracked both our spending on eating out and eating in via our bank accounts. Many banks have budget tracking as part of their offering so this was simple. Each month, we looked at our accounts and saw what we had spent. We did build in some padding around alcohol since our bank’s tracking didn’t differentiate between groceries and alcohol. Overall we were able to start to understand what we were spending per portion.
Portion size was critical in understanding both our food and eating out. If you eat at a casual dining restaurant like fast food, you get one portion of something like a Whopper or Big Mac. A meal at dinner or family-style restaurant can contain 2-3 portions. When you bring home leftovers the money you spent is now for two or more meals, not one.
Let’s compare with some numbers. You can go to a restaurant and spend $15 for a single portion of a meal in which you eat the whole entre. Alternatively, you can go to a restaurant and spend $22 for a large or family-style meal that you take home the extra portion. The meal costing $22 is going to cost you less per portion due to the extra portion you had left over.
We also gathered our empirical evidence of time. When we cooked we decided to occasionally time ourselves to see how long it took. We did the same estimation of eating out from getting in the car to finishing the meal. It isn’t obvious until you really think about it. When you go out, you may get in your car, drive 10 minutes, spend 10 minutes waiting in line to order and get your food, and then drive 10 minutes home, which is 30 minutes of your time spent.
The Budget as a Rubric
We are going to be honest here. This is a guide, not perfection. Figuring out all the nuances of cooking at home versus eating out strictly by numbers is never going to be perfect. There are way too many variables. When you cook at home, you have energy costs. The same occurs when you drive to a restaurant. Your cookware costs money that is amortized over time. When you eat out, there is no energy used to wash the dishes but there can be costs associated with wasted food. Due to all that, we think of this as a rubric rather than a hard and fast formula to prove one is better than the other.
The Budget
We came up with a couple of guidelines for ourselves. To keep it simple, we limited how much nuance went into each. We broke it down into eating in vs. out. The numbers are based on our lifestyle and financial values. This simple guide can be adapted to your needs just as simply.
Eating In
- A maximum cost of $5 per person per meal that includes the appropriate portion sizes needed for our DRI. That includes everything from protein to carbohydrates
- A maximum active time investment, including clean up of 1.5 hours per meal per day.
Eating Out
- A maximum cost of $10 per person per meal portion including gratuity.
- A maximum time investment of 45 minutes from the point we get in the car to the point we are home.
Hold Up, There’s a Change Up
Yes, we did change the language a bit. The word meal snuck in there as did the word active. The reason is eating out vs in is two different things and isn’t an apples-to-apples comparison. When we eat out we are generally served a meal. When we eat we are building a meal out of building blocks described by MyPlate. At the end of the day, both are about portion sizes but we switched the language to call out the differences.
We also used the word active. Many recipes have times when you have to do nothing. If you make bread, it may take 24 hours to fully rise. Your active time, which doesn’t include cleanup, may only be 25 minutes. That is the time you spend actively engaged in making the bread from mixing to mixing to kneading.
We will keep this post brief by addressing both those concepts in depth in later posts. If we don’t take that approach this post becomes too barque to be of value.
How It Shakes Out
When we eat, no matter how many dinners we have, we want to spend only 1.5 hours per day actively preparing food. We also want to keep meals to a fixed budget per portion. This means a couple of things.
- We can prepare food on other days as 1.5 hours a day yields 10.5 hours a week for preparing food. There is no reason we can’t spend 30 minutes making biscuits two days before we use them.
- It is easy to trade off the complexity of a meal by making one item easy to balance out with more active cooking of other portions. A side of coleslaw that takes 5 minutes to make and can easily offset the complexity of frying fish and the clean-up after it.
- You can easily scale up portions to feed more people. In this model, we may pay for more ingredients but economies of scale work for us if we are cooking from scratch. We will talk about this in another post.
- Additional portions can be used later to offset time and money costs for a later meal.
This leaves eating out to be focused on more time management than strictly food costs. By limiting the amount of time we are willing to use for eating out, we gain back time for cooking. Why? Because our criteria are strict enough to force us to eat on a low-time budget. In many cases, we will simply combine a stop-to-eat with other errands when we are already out.
The Curious Case Of Lasagna
We learned some of these rules the hard way. Lasagna was where we realized time and cost were the most important factors. Let’s explore this tale of woe.
Lasagna seems simple and it is. Lasganas is cheese, sauce, noodles, and in our case meat. It makes many portions and is essentially a one-pot meal. It contains protein, carbs, fats, and vegetables. Ok, tomatoes are technically fruits but we aren’t going there and we will consider them vegetables. You can pre-make it and cook it when friends are over so you have time to chat. What an amazing dish! What a terrible time and money suck!
It was after making two dishes for friends that we started to realize this. As we began to bring our change of habits into our social circle we did some experiments. It turns out I can make twelve pork chops in gravy with biscuits and a side of corn in the time it takes me just to make a meat sauce for lasagna. I can also make them cheaper than the lasagna. Why?
Read The Fine Print
Making a lasagna is a multi-step process with multiple ingredients. You have to buy many ingredients which drives the per portion cost up. At a minimum, you will need 3 types of cheese, meat, vegetables, noodles, eggs, and sauce. Many of these ingredients are higher-cost ingredients because they are value-added products like sausage and cheese.
Lasagna isn’t time-friendly either. You make a sauce or augment a store-bought one with meat and spices. Then, you have to make a cheese mixture. Depending on how you do yours, you have to boil noodles. On top of this, you have to assemble everything. After that, you have to bake it in two different steps. It has to then cool. The clean up after all of this is arduous as each step produces dirty dishes and don’t get me started on the baking dish clean up.
Pork chops were a quick sear in a pan and inexpensive proteins. Frozen corn is ubiquitous. Gravy is broth, spices, fat, and a thickener and when done, the pork chops simmer in them. Biscuits take 20 minutes if you are experienced in making them and come from cheap ingredients. The clean-up time for all of the above is less than 20 minutes. Tl;dr: it’s all about active time and cost and you have to read the recipe closely to understand where the true costs are.
Wrapping Up
We have discussed several different concepts here. At the core is the idea of the time and money cost of what we eat. These are rubrics we came up with to guide us. We will eat out at a more expensive restaurant again sometime and we will probably make another lasagna. These guidelines help us frame our decision points to make better choices in how we spend our money and time.