wow you eat out a lottt

It is a great reference, thanks.

At the high end, the per-head results depend a lot on what kind on wine you get. Easy at the Angus Barn, for example, to spend more on wine than on food.

Thank You! This is great. A few surprises: The pizza & burger places were more expensive then I would have thought.

Pretty interesting stuff. We are trained to assume that the typical fast food places (Wendys, Sonic, etc.) are much cheaper when in fact there are alternatives for maybe a dollar more where you can get much healther and less processed food.

Did I miss something, or have you not eaten at Poole’s Diner? Hard to believe it’s not on this list.

shoeboxed is great-they are based in durham too

Hey Dana, I am still waiting to hear what you ate at Costco that cost you almost 10 bucks a person. It’s keeping me up at night thinking about it.

Hey Dana, The chicken bake at Costco is pretty yummy. I dare not ask how much fat is in it since it’s a baked pastry filled with chicken and some sort of creamy sauce. It’s probably a day’s worth of fat grams. I think it runs about 3 bucks or so. Add a berry sundae and a fountain drink + tax, it’s a huge gut filling meal for under $6. Of course, the old stand-by is the $1.50 foot long dog+soda. For under ten bucks, you can feed a family of 6 with those meals.

HAha. $36 worth of Taco Bell sounds like a world of HURT! I know what you mean about having the image of those receipts. I generally enter them in Quicken and throw them in the can for my shredder and keep everything reconciled in the meantime. Quarterly I’ll pull out the shredder motor and shred all of the papers. I scan receipts that may be important, but not that many. I always worry that I’ll need some receipt going in the shredder.

I definitely think it costs less to make meals at home. I have a system for that, too. We will make a recipe, timing the amount of prep time. On one side of an index card we put the name of the entire meal and the total cost of ingredients and actual prep time (circled). On the back goes the shopping list for the meal. They are all kept in a little file box in the pantry. The idea is to pull out the little box to plan the week’s meals. I think the whole thing would work just as well in Evernote, to be honest, though.

Point is, we can make things from Magnolia Grill and Bloomsbury Bistro-type restaurants for ~$15-$20 a head (food only). Avoiding ridiculous alcohol markups, and you really do end up saving dinero. No it isn’t as adventurous as trying something that requires the skill of an expert. Yes, there are other variables like time, effort, the dining experience, etc, but we’re only discussing the cost variable here, right

I just looked at Shoeboxed for a while, and I think I like my system better. IF I wanted to, I could throw those receipts through my $420 scanner and it would maybe take 10 minutes for a whole month?? Comparing to the $20/mo plan the scanner pays for itself in 2 yrs, plus there is the added bonus of keeping my info private, archiving on my terms, not worrying about the long-term viability of the data storage company, and not worrying about a set number of articles per month. (BTW this scanner scans both sides at a 3s/pg rate, saving them in jpg or pdf formats. Pretty neat!

Costco should be no cost as they serve so much food free just walking the aisles.

Dana check out Savoy in the Greystone Shopping Center on Lead Mine at Sawmill. It’s awesome and they give you muffins for breakfast the next morning … how cool is that? So when you figure your averages be sure to divide by 2 (dinner and breakfast) ha ha