058 – Dining In vs. Dining Out: A Quick Time and Cost Comparison

Released Monday, 7th May 2018

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058 – Dining In vs. Dining Out: A Quick Time and Cost Comparison

Monday, 7th May 2018

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How does dining in compare to dining at restaurants, ordering takeout, or requesting delivery? Let’s break it down holding most variables static to get a sense for the time and cost differences of each!

058 – Dining In vs. Dining Out: A Quick Time and Cost Comparison

22 min episode

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This week I want to talk a little bit about food, specifically the differences between buying groceries and cooking at home versus ordering take-out or dining at a restaurant, to break down some numbers and highlight pros and cons to each.

This has been top of mind for me recently because as you might know from episode 56, I’ve recently undergone an expensive move and my living expense has increased due to living alone for the first time. Because I work in sales, approximately half of my income comes from commissions paid quarterly, so as a general rule I spend maybe 80-90% of my base salary on expenses and save 10-20%, and apply the reverse for commissions. The reason I’m mentioning this is that after an expensive month of moving and having a medical procedure, I felt this would be an opportune time to really focus on diligent money and/or time saving habits in other areas to help offset the increase to my expenses. An obvious area for this was food; now with that being said, this episode will basically be breaking down the math behind just one adult, but as an easy rule if you’re feeding a family you should basically increase time investment for dining in, and slightly less than multiply the cost by the number of people because obviously adding people costs more, but usually can justify buying in higher quantity which can really help drive down cost and reduce food waste.

Let’s start with dining out. I was doing a lot more of this during the moving process due to everything being in flux, so it was difficult logistically to shop for fresh groceries and cook when a lot of things were in boxes between two different apartments. For one person in the San Francisco Bay Area, typically dining out to sit in a restaurant and order one dish, plus tip, would take about 10-20 total minutes of driving, 30-45 minutes waiting for food, eating, and paying, and would cost about $15. This is true for either lunch or dinner provided I’m avoiding quick service or fast casual dining in, which can be a bit faster and cost close to half as much, but is usually less healthy. So this nets out to around an hour of time and $15 in cost. If I do this for lunches and dinners 7 days a week, that’s about 14 hours a week or 56 hours a month, and a monthly food cost of around $900 excluding take-out or dine-in breakfasts, snacks, and more extravagant experiences like on a nice date, out for a birthday party, or drinks at a bar or winery.

Similar to dining out, let’s look at take-out. Take-out experiences typically save me some time, requiring about 10-20 minutes of driving but maybe only 10 minutes to wait in line order, and receive the order to head home to eat. So let’s say that’s about a 30 minute time investment, with a typical meal for one adult running around $8. Obviously this cuts our “do this for every meal” time and money investment nearly half over sitting down in a restaurant for every meal, to around 28 hours a month and around $500. But of course, eating take-out and fast food twice a day every day is extremely unadvisable for obvious health reasons, so I only share the example for the sake of the exercise rather than to say this a viable and recommended alternative to dining at a proper restaurant or eating and cooking groceries.

Also for the sake of the exercise, let’s very quickly look at delivery, because I know a lot of people love to use and abuse Postmates and similar food delivery apps. Generally with these, people are ordering from restaurants, but due to fees and delivery driver tips, this places a pretty substantial cost premium on the food, probably increasing the cost of every meal by around 150-200%. Let’s assume you’re paying $25 for a restaurant meal delivered to your door; for two meals a day all month that would be $1500 a month. Of course, the reason anyone would choose this delivery option frequently would be for the convenience and time savings as placing an order or phone call and coming to the door to get your food probably demands at the most about 5 minutes per meal, or 5 hours a month. On Episode 48 we talked about your hourly rate so if you haven’t determined that, you should listen to that episode after this. The delivery-for-every-meal option really only makes sense if you essentially save money due to the time you save; in this case, compared to sit-down restaurant eating 60 times a month, you’re paying a $600 premium to save about 50 hours, which comes to about $12 an hour. This is not at all a difficult hourly rate to beat, BUT the rub here is that if you simply waste the hour, i.e. you’re ordering delivery out of laziness so you can keep watching Netflix, then understand that you’re basically paying $12 for the right to do that every time you do that. Ordering delivery is only advisable for people who can actually make highly productive use of the time savings — given the dollar cost difference is pretty low at $12 an hour, ideally you are using that hour to produce a $13 or higher return. If you’re a freelancer taking on extra projects that pay well, or if you are an hourly employee who can take on overtime, then there is a case for ordering delivery from time to time or regularly, strictly from a cost-benefit analysis of time and money and ignoring other implications such as the healthiness of what you’re ordering, which we’ve more or less ignored in all of these examples again for the sake of the exercise.

Lastly let’s look at dining in. I have a Costco membership that runs around $60 a year, and in a typical trip to Costco I might spend $100 on food, excluding extraneous purchases like supplements, appliances, or Kombucha. $100 on food at Costco can be broken down roughly as 24 pre-marinated Garlic Sesame chicken breasts for about $20, 12 pre-marinated pollo asado chicken breasts for about $15, a 10-20 pound bag of rice for about $20, which might be purchased at a different grocery store because Costco’s bulk options can be excessive at times, two or three boxes of fruit such as blueberries, strawberries, and grapes which total about $20, a bag or two of vegetables like spring mix or broccoli which totals around $5-8, with about $20 still left over for free-play. Personally I’ll spend that $20 on two dozen eggs for something like $5, a bag of something crunchy and salty like some bougie tortilla chips for about $5, and something convenient and frozen like a $10 box or bag of decent quality taquitos that I can microwave as a lunch when I’m short on time. I could throw another $20 or so down on a box of protein bars or some similar calorie-dense packaged food as snacks between meals. After tax that list should break down to only a few bucks over $100 or around $120-130 with a box of protein bars or something similar, and I’d estimate this to take me around an hour and a half to two hours to drive, shop, pay for, transport in a handful of trips up several flights of stairs in to my apartment, and store in appropriate locations in the fridge and cabinets.

In a typical dinner, I’ll mix and match the elements above, with one chicken breast at the crux of each meal. Rice will usually work as my starch or carb and I may add protein to the mix with two or three eggs, or replace the eggs with cooked vegetables. Usually I’ll eat a bowl of mixed fruit before my meal when I’m waiting for the rice to cook in a pressure cooker. That means that my $100 of non-snack groceries leave me with about 40-50 meals, and that’s only slowed down by running out of chicken. Along the way I’ll have to likely take one more trip in the month to re-up on fresh produce since it tends to need to be eaten quickly before going bad. A 20 pound bag of rice eaten at a pace of one meal a day will last absurdly long. Overall I’d estimate the grocery cost in this type of setup at around $3-4 a meal, with an actually-involved time commitment of about 20 minutes, which is mostly to prepare the rice and cook the chicken in a pan. Of course, this doesn’t too effectively account for what you’d have to do in order to make your own lunches during a work day assuming you can’t or don’t go home to cook every meal in the middle of the day. My work personally caters 3 lunches a week, so I generally bring some sort of lunch one day a week and go out one day a week, plus about 2 meals out total in a typical weekend as a treat or to spend time with someone else over a meal. It’s a bit more complex to get an exact figure because every person will have a different situation on what they have access to, but to keep the comparison simple to the other options we broke down, let’s call this about $6 a day for lunch and dinner at a 40 minute commitment, or about 45 minutes if you average in the time required to take one or two grocery trips a month. This comes to $180 a month and 22 and a half hours spent shopping and cooking.

Obviously, the decision is yours, and for most people, myself included, there will be a blend of a few of these elements in a given month. However, if you’re looking to optimize, I personally believe the bang for your buck AND time lies in the core of your eating being done at home with simple, well rounded meals with the occasional restaurant experience and delivery. For me personally, one or two dine out experiences a week, and one or two take-out meals a week keeps my cost in the range of a reasonable $400 a month without compromising my health or efficiency.

I hope that was helpful and if it was, we’d love to hear from you, whether you’re a regular reader or brand new, follow us on instagram @thewealthyhealthy and subscribe wherever you’d like to follow the show! As always and until next time… be good and be great.