Reducing Out Eating Out Budget: Week 2

Remember from this post that we are trying to reduce the amount of times we go out to eat this week?  Well week 2 was just as successful as Week 1!  I'm very excited about how well we're doing.  Let's post the calendar.

Thursday night, Drew and I went to see Jurassic World.  (It was a super awesome movie, by the way!  Go see it if you haven't already.)  Since we had the wedding that weekend, we went ahead and made plans to go out for dinner before the movie.  We grabbed Chick-fil-a in the mall.  Yum.

Friday, we did our usual routine of going out for lunch.  We had the wedding rehearsal dinner Friday night.  Saturday, I had to be at the wedding venue pretty early in the day.  All of the bridesmaids had agreed to bring food to snack on, and I chose to bring a hometown delicacy - slug burgers.  I haven't had one in sooo long!  So I ate some of those for lunch.  Drew showed a little more restraint and ate a pizza at home.

After a long wedding-weekend, we decided to go to lunch after church.  Dinner Sunday night was had at a couples shower for some sweet friends at church.

Like I said, I feel pretty good about how things are going.  We're on target to reduce our spending by about 1/3!  I'm ok with that.  :)

Reducing Our Eating Out Budget: Week 1

Our goal for June is to reduce how much money we spend on dining out.  We're not targeting a specific amount of money; we're targeting a number of times to go out.  After a few months of this, I think we'll be able to determine a new budget.

Over the past 6 months, we've averaged spending 9% of our monthly income on going out.  For us, we felt like that was too much.  Our new goal is to go out once a week for lunch and once a week for dinner.

Let's see how week 1 went:

Overall, I think we did very well this week.  We each went to lunch once during the work week, and we had one date-night dinner.  Thursday night, I had a work dinner but met up with Drew at a birthday dinner later that night.  So his meal came out of our budget, while mine was made for by my employer.  Sunday, I had a moment of weakness.  It was one of those days that I just did. not. feel like cooking; so we grabbed Mexican for lunch.  Don't worry.   We followed it up with a 14-mile bike ride to burn off some of the calories.  :)

This upcoming week will be an interesting one for our new goal.  I'm in a wedding Saturday, so we'll be out of town Friday night and most of the day Saturday.  Then Dew's parents are joining us for church Sunday morning, followed by co-hosting a bridal shower for some friends that afternoon.  It'll be a busy weekend, but I'm positive we can do it!