Want to save money? Skip the kid's meal

Posted By Paul

My wife and I often have dinner with friends (who also have little ones). Since the kids aren't quite up to restaurant age yet we get takeout from various restaurants around town and we take turns hosting the meal.

We have been doing this for years, and we generally orders kid's meals so that our little ones will have something to eat.

Just a few weeks ago while our friends were hosting we noticed that our little one wasn't really interested in the restaurant food we ordered for him that week, so our friends offered him some apples and mac and cheese (which he happily ate).

We decided to try that from now on, where both families agree to have simple kid food available when it is their turn to host, so we don't feel the need to include kid's meals in our restaurant orders.

We save money on the kids meals and if our little one ends up wanting to try our restaurant fare my wife and I are happy to share our food. We've noticed this works especially well since our little one seems to enjoy trying new foods so he often prefers trying our food as opposed to his kids meal which is often a fairly boring chicken finger and fries sort of thing.

Plus when we get all the little ones together they often want to play, so the meal part of the evening is often brief and we end up giving him a snack at home right before bedtime anyway, so why pay the extra money for the food he doesn't eat?

Ways To Save On Eating Out

Posted By Paul

My wife and I are continuing our experiments to save money and we have been employing a strategy that is really working for us.

As with many people, eating out is a significant optional expense (especially if it gets out of hand), so my wife and I have been watching it closely.

One thing we did this weekend was that instead of our "usual" breakfast restaurant we went and had bagels and coffee at a bakery. It was still fun, we got out of the house and enjoyed a breakfast together as a family, but at a fraction of the cost. We made up for our light breakfast with an early lunch.

It was even better for our little one because we didn't have to wait for a table (our favorite dinner haunt gets crowded on the weekends) and it only took a moment to toast up a bagel so he only had to wait a couple of minutes for food.

We're looking for other ways to replace "eating out" with "snacking out" as a way to save money while still enjoying the experience of going out.