Save on Eating Out

Here are a few ways to save on eating out at restaurants.

There are various ways of saving money when you go out to eat, but basically they fall into two strategies.  You can save by changing your behavior while in the restaurant or by finding coupons or discounts in advance.  We’ll cover both here.

First, lets talk about changing your behavior while at the restaurant.  Of course, part of the fun of going out to eat is having a wide selection to choose from, and we all know that some meals are more costly than others.  Chicken is generally cheaper than lobster. Still, there are a few things you can eliminate that would still allow you to have a great meal and lower the overall bill.   Restaurants have a high profit margin on their beverages and their deserts.  So, always ask for a glass of ice water (making sure its not some fancy bottled water from Italy or something).  If you can ejoy your meal with just water as your beverage you will be saving probably on average $1.75 per meal.

When you finish the meal, don’t order desert.  The markup on desert is tremendous and if you actually stopped to think about it, $5.00 -$7.00 is very costly for a piece of cake or ice cream.  If you have a group of four and you cut out beverages and desert you could easily save  close to $28 off the entire bill.  That will also correspondingly lower the amount of tip you need to leave, too.
The entrée part of your meal can be lowered too.  Generally, pasta dishes or vegetarian dishes are less expensive than meat dishes.  Also, white meat dishes are generally less expensive than red meat dishes.
Another thing you can do if you are a bird-like eater is ask for ½ protions or order a child’s meal.  They’re usually much less than the adult size, yet can be filling enough if you’re a light eater.
Definitely time your trip to the restaurant to coincide with their two-for-one type offers.  If two of you can eat for the price of one and you minimize the cost by not ordering desert or beverages, you can eat out more often without busting your budget.
The other strategy is to look for coupons, discounts, and websites before you go.  Every week in most neighborhoods, you get flyers in the mail from www.ValPak.com offering 2 for 1, general discounts, or ½ off nights.  Look through these and keep whichever coupon appeals to you.  The good thing about ValPak is that you can go to their website and see all the applicable coupons for your zip code and its totally free to download a coupon that appeals to you.

You can also buy a coupon book from www.entertainment.com for $25 that has good coupons for lots of really good restaurants in most metro areas.  The advantage to this book is that you can try lots of different restaurants, all with a discount of some sort and thereby get variety and perhaps find a new favorite restaurant.  It also contains coupons for other things like movies, tourist activities, hotels, etc…  The bad thing is you have to pay $25 for it.  If you don’t go out to eat a lot, or wouldn’t use the other coupons, then this is not a good choice for you.
There are also several really good websites that offer you the opportunity of downloading coupons before you go.  Here are two others that I’ve found useful:

www.restaurant.com - This website allows you to buy gift certificates for participating restaurants for a discount.  For example,  you can buy a $25 gift certificate for $10.  It has a lot of participating restaurants.  You login, choose a restaurant and then buy the certificate.  The reason this is so good is that not only can you save a bundle, but they have so many participating restaurants.

www.hotcoupons.com - Just put in your zip code and you will see a list of categories for which they have coupons.  If you click on restaurants, you’ll see several choices for your area.  The good thing is there is no cost, but choice and supply are a bit more limited than restaurant.com
 

These sites offer newsletters/email coupons regularly.  If you sign up, they’ll send emails with special promotions and coupons which will cost you nothing and help you save on eating out.

www.olivegarden.com (newsletter signup at the top right of the home page)

www.macaronigrill.com (under ‘Lets Connect’, then ‘Join the Mac Pack’)

www.chilis.com (under ‘Email Club’ at the top of the homepage)

www.fridays.com (Under ‘Join Friday’s E-Club on right side of home page)

www.eltorito.com (sign up under ‘Que Pasa’)

www.maggianos.com (under ‘Join our email list’ at the very bottom of the home page)

www.bennigans.com (under ‘Join the Club’)

Also, several restaurants offer ‘birthday clubs’ where the birthday boy or girl will get their dinner for free.  If you can get a free meal once a year, why not?

Save Money on Groceries

 

We all need to buy groceries.  The good news is that there are many things you can do to lower your grocery shopping bills. Read more