Dining out and travel. Travel is often easy to cut, but lowering your dining out expenditures is deceptively complex.
If you stop eating out as much, what’s your alternative? Preparing meals at home. What does that look like?
Do you buy mostly prepared food from the grocery store or meal kits? While this is still likely less expensive than dining out, these alternatives may not reduce your food budget as much as you need.
To significantly reduce your food expenses requires cooking at home. But what if you don’t have much skill? Should you invest the time and money to improve your cooking skills? Plus you have to add time to shop and cook.
This example is why budgets can be hard. It’s not always just cutting out things you like (example: travel). With some categories, you have to replace one expenditure with another. And the replacement may require changes to how you spend your time, learning a new skill, or additional planning.
Do you have questions about organizing your finances? Leave a note in the comments!