The Money Experiment: Dining out is not so in!
The above graph pretty much tells the story but since I have the bragging rights for my Money Experiment, I’m going to use them anyways 
If you have been following my Money Experiment, you might already know that I have been using several different techniques to come up with ways to save more and spend less money. In one of my articles, I had spoken about our exponentially increasing dining bills lately. The chart above is a standing testimony to our mammoth dining expenditure in the past 3 months or so. So, in January we decided it was time to take matter into our own hands and come up with a plan. The above chart shows how much we ended up spending on dining by the end of Jan.
We decided we were going to use cash instead of plastic for all our Dining expenses and allocated $200 at the start of the month. We told ourselves; that is all you are going to get for the rest of the month for eating out. If we ran over the budget, there was no other option than to eat at home. We weren’t too optimistic in the beginning and thought we will use up the cash in the first week or two itself and the plan would fall flat on its face. Then, as we started thinking more and more about it, it didn’t feel all that impossible. $200 a month meant $50 every week. We had decided we wouldn’t be eating out on weekdays, so that meant $50 every weekend. Somehow we had to make do with fifty bucks for the whole weekend. We had two options, eat at a cheap restaurant on both Saturday and Sunday nights or eat at a pricier one only on Saturdays. Then Khushi gave me a better idea, why not eat at a cheap place for 3 weeks (both days) and a little upscale one on the last Saturday of the month? That sounded like a brilliant idea. I also picked up a Restaurant.com gift certificate for $25 which kinda bumped up the budget a little. Not much, just a little.
To be honest, initially, there was a strong urge to give up. We were used to going out on all three days of the weekend. Not to mention the random trips on weekdays whenever we were bored or sore from a workout. After the first week, though, we started getting used to it. In fact, it was really exciting to wait all week for that one special Saturday night dinner. In the process, I picked up my long-lost hobby of cooking. The last time I had cooked was when I was in college. It was pretty enthralling to get back to cooking good food while also impressing your wife at the same time 
She never knew I could cook. Hehehe. Last week, we finally pulled our numbers out and we were really really surprised to see what we had spent on dining over the past four weeks. The total was $162. Yes, we had infact exceeded our expectations by 38 bucks. It did take a lot of discipline but at the same time, it was a mighty good experience, which I’d love to go through month after month 
. As a side effect, we have gotten a little leaner and our BMIs have come down considerably. Try it out yourself, you will have a great time.