This week we are trying to catch up… at home with cleaning and bills, outside with weeding and landscape care, and with the budget! It’s amazing how fast you can spend money if you’re not careful. Eating out is an incredible cost to the family budget. I recently examined what eating out would cost for a family of three for a year… breakfast, lunch and dinner at average restaurants with bills for a single family meal ranging from $18 to $29. It totaled over $27,000 for a year!  That’s an amazing number, and although we don’t eat out that often, we do eat out two or three times a week. Just adding up those costs would probably make me cringe. I had neighbors a few years ago that did eat almost every single meal at restaurants. They said the enjoyed it, and didn’t like to cook at home. I wonder if they understood the true cost of doing so? Another area we need to watch is buying prepared meals at the grocery store. Some of those meal packages are quite expensive, and effectively is like “eating out at home” based on the cost. We are all so busy that finding time to “cook from scratch” can be a challenge. I was discussing the issue with an aquaintance recently, and she told the story of a woman who was struggling to save for retirement as well as her child’s future education costs. But she loved to dine out and didn’t see it as relevant to her savings and future goals. But when asked if she was willing to sacrifice her child’s future education needs by eating out each day, she stated that she never thought of it that way. Perhaps we simply need to examine the context in which we rationlize our spending. What are we giving up in the future to save time, or enjoy doing something today? It’s not easy to see a future goal as a tangible reality… but when it comes to saving, investing and achieving financial goals for retirement, we must try to understand how our actions impact our future needs. What we do today affects how we may live tomorrow. Of course, the trip to the new Cabela’s store the other day didn’t help my goals very much! But every day is new… and catching up to achieve my future goals is something I’ll continue to work towards. We can always do better, just like the Wal-Mart slogan…
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