By Kevin M
Redeeming Riches has been running a truly good series, 10 Money-Saving Tips to Help You Stash $10,000!, which includes tips in each post on how to accumulate such a pile of cash, one expense at a time. The initial post in the series ran back on February 22nd, and took aim at cutting back on going out to eat as the first tip in the quest.
It’s almost standard fare on the personal finance blogging circuit to take aim at eating out as a rich source of savings, either to build up a bigger bank balance, or to reign in a runaway budget. But how much money can we save by cutting back on this expense?
Running the numbers on eating out
Let’s do some quick calculations to illustrate just how much money we’re talking about.
It costs about $25 for a family of four to buy a meal at a typical fast food restaurant. Averaging just two trips per week totals $50; continuing the pattern each week over the course of a full year comes to $2600.
Restaurant Tipping – How Much and When?
By Kevin M
This is just my opinion, but I think tipping is kind of a crappy set up. A restaurant relies on tips to pay the staff a decent wage, so the waiter/waitress is caught in the middle, working for a business that won’t pay them fully for what they do, but never certain the customer will either.
That’s why I don’t have a problem tipping, even though there should be a better way. But the reality is that there isn’t, so we work with what we have. It’s worth remembering too that if restaurants paid their staff living wages the menu prices would be substantially higher, so the upshot is that we have some flexibility on the price if we don’t like the service.
Everyone has their own ideas when it comes to tipping, and here are mine.
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