@dfwxjer wrote:
@AndrewF wrote:
As for groceries and eating out, eating out is a luxury expense. I do not wish to intrude on your financial business, but I would say that I am under fiscal pressure and have stopped eating out and we're no worse off for it. I know how to cook.
Yesterday I just decided to make it simple and make bacon, scrambled eggs, and biscuits with butter and blakberry preserves for dinner.
Eating out is such a giant problem in this country... Like you have correctly pointed out, making food at home is far cheaper 100% of the time, and no amount of cope will convince me otherwise. It's truly amazing to me how people will cope justify this expense when I review their finances, and even worse are the ones that Doordash/UberEats food they already couldn't afford. The range of excuses is vast from they "don't have time" to they "don't have energy" after working 8 hours in a day. $7 coffee in the morning, $25 for lunch, $75 to Doordash fast food for their family... it is wild to me that people are paying these prices on a regular basis and it is very hard to get them to understand what they're doing is unnecessary and financially harming them.
The common thing is that these same people spend 6-10 hours a day staring at their phone and simply don't have discipline to meal prep. After challenging every excuse with logic and reason, they usually state the actual reason... "It's easier to just order things". Well of course it's easier to pay other people to do work.
My wife and I are blessed to have a solid household income and I still refuse to pay for UberEats/DoorDash, aside from once a month I use my Amex $15 credit to order Shake Shack for pickup. When I see people making 1/4 of what we do just burning money on fast food I stop feeling bad for the majority of 20 somethings that say they can't afford life. Healthy working age folks that can't understand how to make $65k a year work out...
My ex complains about them eating at Chipotle for over $60 every night and I said "You know, you don't have to do that. Even if you tip someone and have the store pick and deliver your food, cooking won't come out to $1800 a month."
He goes, "Yeah but I'm so busy." I said, "All that overtime is going towards a car you shouldn't have financed and $1800 in eating out."
I'm getting ready to scuttle the car. It unexpectedly developed a major engine problem and I'm just going to scrap it, sell it for whatever Carvana offers me and close the books on it.
I've been spending roughly $80-90 a week to feed me and my new partner, and it's simply a matter of eating leftovers and prioritizing recipes that lean into what you already have on hand so there's less purchasing of new spices and condiments and stuff.
If he insisted that we go spend nearly that much every single night this relationship would be terminated because I already had to file bankruptcy once. I'm not keen on doing that again.
And people who are in serious debt take offense when you start suggesting, trying to help them really, ways to cut the fat in the budget. If you live in Chicago, sell the **bleep** car, cook at home, eat your leftovers. It's amazing how well you can live when you optimize spending.
I don't spend $7 on coffee in a week for both of us put together, much less in a single go.
I told him "The coffee maker is there. Splenda, vanilla syrup, and half and half are available."
The Starrbucks Effect is making people poor. Making coffee is not a problem that you have to hire people for.
The idea that you're too busy to cook and clean and too good for leftovers, and too busy to press a button on the coffee maker, you're pulling those hours at work for nothing. It's all going right back out and it's bleeding you of more money than the hours at work are worth.
This week I bought Diet Pepsi Minis, two packs. Why? Well, they were running a promotion where they gave you a $7.99 rotisserie chicken for free and the Diet Pepsi was already on sale two for $10. I also stacked a $3 off the Pepsi coupon when you buy four burger patties.
I need the chicken for a casserole, the casserole will feed us for three days. I'm so glad my new partner isn't picky. He lived in a country where he had no electricity until 1998, the water there killed two of his brothers, he mostly subsided on rice. Sometimes they had a can of sardines to eat with the rice, and split five ways. He's glad he's not there anymore. He's grateful for what he has.
The way Americans act, native born Americans, is like a bunch of whiny sissy people, who have to have their $7 lattes and act like you're asking them to drink out of the toilet if it's the tap, it's just absurd. Doordash? Are you freaking kidding me? Every night they eat double price McDonald's and it's not even good? They need to put on their big boy pants and slash prices and quit complaining. Do they know that 90% of the people in this world live worse than they do? I guarantee 90% live worse than anything they can possibly imagine.
That coupon trick essentially made the two packs of Diet Pepsi -$1. Normally I would have not bought soda at all. The price is up like WHOA and it's just another expense. I also have some burger patties for burgers and baked beans on July 4th when I fire up the grill!
As I mentioned previously at some length, running tap water through Amazon Basics filters and putting it in the fridge is refreshing and costs about 5 cents a gallon. You can't beat that really. I noticed when I drink a lot of soda I feel like crap, water does not do that. It hydrates. Soda is a treat. You should not be guzzling the stuff.
Told my mom she's spending $150 a month on bottled water when she tried to rub her $900 rent in my face. She said it's still cheaper to live there. I said, "You also have cars, so you have expenses for gasoline, upkeep, and insurance." She's paying over $1800 a year for car insurance. They took away her safe driving discount because some Mr. Magoo without his glasses on illegally drove the wrong way down the street and hit her parked car, so her insurance went up 17% for something that was not even her fault.
I mean the costs of living somewhere where the government doesn't do anything seem low, but really they just get spread out all over the place, because you turn on the tap, it's gross, you go buy water, you can't get on a train or a bus, so you have to own a car.
At least when I pay a 1% RTA tax on gross sales receipts I know that transit is being taken care of. When you have a car, every assumption goes out the window, because there's insurance and gas which trend upward, but there's also months where it doesn't need repairs then thousands of dollars of things happen all at once. Every year I have to go spend $200 on a plate sticker and a wheel tax, well without a car we just won't do that now. Over ten years that's another $2,000 if it doesn't continue going up.
People need to practice gratitude for what they have. They need to remind themselves, constantly, of everything that's going right, even when bad stuff happens, and how some things are just a blessing in disguise, like the engine is dying on my car, oh well. Sell it. I don't need it anymore and it was just a slow motion curse of gas, repairs, and insurance.
When you have a car in Chicago you're almost making a statement. The statement is that you're willing to pay an enormous cost and get stuck in traffic and move around much slower than if you got on Metra or the CTA, because you're you.
It reminds me of the movie Parasite, where the guy was complaining that his driver's clothing smelled like "boiled rags", "like that smell you experience sometimes on the subway".
It's a form of elitism, really, and I can't really afford that. There's nothing wrong with the transit here. The sensationalist reporting on alarmist and biased media notwithstanding, there's very little reason to fear the CTA and even less reason to fear being on the Metra or PACE, in most cases. Obviously, you want to avoid the bad neighborhoods, but I know where those are and I don't go there and I've never felt unsafe on the CTA even when I was living there.
Ditching the car is like getting a $3-4 an hour raise at work, on average, and I have to do nothing to get it. It increases my net worth over time to just write it off, and anything I can get out of it in this state from Carvana just soothes the losses I took on it.
