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I translated food costs to my income per-day, after taxes/rent. The choices were: * 1 work day allocated to making/eating 20 personally made meals a month *
by losteric 9y ago
I translated food costs to my income per-day, after taxes/rent.
The choices were:
* 1 work day allocated to making/eating 20 personally made meals a month
* 2 work days allocated to eating 20 professionally meals a month.
Factoring in time, variety, and the fact that professional meals taste better than mine - yes, I absolutely eat out most days. I'll pinch pennies on bigger items like car insurance or rent, but food was simply a good cost-benefit trade off.
YMMV; cost-benefit is subjective.
- ThrustVectoring 9y agoImportant point: you may or may not have any control of the number of paid work days you have. The time you save won't trade against the average value of your time, but the rate at which you can trade time for money at the margin. So if you save an hour and spend $30, you wind up behind in cash-flow if you can't monetize your extra time. And, uhh, most fixed-salary programmers don't have great options for spending an extra hour a week and winding up with more cash. In my opinion, eating out is definitely a luxury. If/when I get serious about saving more money, cooking my own meals is absolutely the first thing to do.
- losteric 9y agoSaving money is not my point here... it's saving personal time. Every month I have surplus income, after expenditures/long-term savings, but never have I had surplus time. There are always more things to do! I am committed to ~160 work hours / month. Of that, I spend 10 work hours buying lunch - versus spending 2 work hours and 5 personal hours making my own lunch. Spending 8 work hours to buy 5 personal hours is worthwhile for me.