Buona sera!
I’m the ‘honey’ or Tom’s other half! I won’t be around as much as Tom on the blog, but I do enjoy writing and I love saving money, so from time to time, I will pop in and share something with all you fabulous readers. I hope it inspires you and that you feel free to share things back with me too. Let’s start with tonight’s dinner! Yum! We believe in both saving money and eating well.
It’s Italian night in our home, but with it comes a lot of discussion. I admit it, I love eating out and it has become way too routine for me to insist that Tom take me to a fairly nice dinner on Saturday night. He’s great about it, but sometimes it is so rushed and we spend so much money that we later think it might have been nicer to just eat at home. So, this week, that’s exactly what we are doing and with it, we are saving some decent money. Let’s break it down a bit.
Real Prices Compared
Our local Italian Restaurant:
Baked Manicotti including salad and Italian Bread (for 1) – $16.50 or $33.00 for 2
Italian Cake (1 slice) – $6.99 or $13.98 for 2
Diet Coke (1) – $1.99 or $3.98 for 2
Total for 2 – $50.96 + $10.00 (tip) + $3.57 (7.5% taxes) = $64.52
Made at Home
Baked Manicotti – $4.99 (enough for 3)
Loaf of Bakery Italian Bread – $1.49
Butter Cake with Whipped Topping – $2.50 (enough for 6-8 servings)
Diet Coke – $.50 each or $1.00 for 2
Total for 2 (plus leftovers) – $9.98
Savings —– $54.54
We Stayed In While Saving Money
As you can see, on this one Saturday night deciding to stay in saved us over $50 and yet we had a great meal with stuff leftover for lunches tomorrow. In addition to the money savings for dinner, any nice restaurant that we want to go to is at least a 30 minute car trip each way and with winter heavily upon us, that also means at least a 10 minute warm-up of the car prior to leaving home and safety concerns. Because of this, we not only was saving money and eating well, we was able to do so in the comfort of our own home.
Does this mean we won’t ever go out and have a nice meal together? No way! I enjoy going out and we often use it as a social avenue when meeting friends, but it does mean we are going to try to look at that bottom line a bit more often, so we can tuck $50 in money savings away for another adventure or investment. For tonight, we stayed in and I think we are both glad that we did because dinner was delizioso!!
Save on!
Karen
