I confess. As much as I love to save money, I’m a total sucker for going out to eat. While intellectually I know that going out to eat is a COMPLETE waste of money, the fact that I don’t have to cook or clean up is oh, so tempting.
When we do go out, we usually go without our kids. It’s not that we don’t love them, but well….if I’m going to fork over the money for someone else to serve me hot food, I want to eat it while it’s hot! And with 2 toddlers and an infant, it’s just not so easy.
We also try to always go out to a place where we have a coupon or a place that has a good special.
We love restaurants that offer double dinner deals. (I.e. Buy 2 meals for $12.99).
On the rare occasions where we take our children with us to a restaurant, we try to pick places that have unlimited supplies of something (usually bread). And of course we like any restaurant that offers free or nearly free kids meals.
What’s your favorite "frugal" restaurant?? How do you save money when you go out to eat??
3 comments:
We try to hit the ones having the kids night for that particular night.
We're also ones to share a course to make the dollar stretch a bit further. Unless I am in a splurging mood, I also will get lemon water to save the $2 or if we're not at a sit down restaurant, Derin and I will share a large drink to avoid that extra cost as well.
We watch for specials nights like Rally's 69cent cheeseburgers on Sunday & Wednesday, etc. If we are in a rush for time and fast food screams convenience, we'll try to hit one of those.
Another mindset I've recently taken on with our current budget crunch is to not go to get filled up. I'll order light, eat a snack before we leave so we don't get an appetizer, or purposely save half the meal for a take home and eat the next day for lunch box. I'd rather eat out for the ambience more often than less often and eat more. Then you don't really enjoy it afterwards anyway because you're so stuffed from wanting to not leave a morsel on your expensive plate.
I love to eat out!!! I think it is the limitless iced tea that they bring me! Many of the restaurants in our area have "kids eat free" evenings (I have some listed on my site katymom.com). We love Mexican food, and the four of us can eat at La Finca for less than $20-of course I have to give up the tea :(. Still worth it!
Post a Comment