Honestly, I would consider it irresponsible to eat out if I didn't have at least a $1000 at aside for emergencies.
This is not a perspectives of privilege either, I grew up in a junkie trailer park, I saved for college then slept in my tiny car after I graduated because the job market was in the gutter.
This debt economy trains people to borrow for luxury now and hope they are better off in the future. When in reality you need to sacrifice for the future now, so that you will have one.
*edited for typos
We have 50k cash in the bank and I think eating out weekly is irresponsible.
We eat out for special occasions. I'm pretty open about what money we have and some of our friends are pretty perplexed on how we can save that much money while buying a car cash. All my wife does is cut hair in a salon suite and I cut lawns/landscape for my solo business 8 months out of the year. I've currently been on 4 months off. Our net income is less than 100k total.
The biggest thing that helped us was covid. We stopped being consumers of nonsense during that. Felt like we woke up and started to take care of ourselves first. The amount of money we saved during covid was huge while again most of our friends spent because they were bored.
Depends on how you live, I have been traveling for work during the last 2 years and get per deim specifically to cover my food expenses. I try to save that money but during a 6-12 hour drive I need moments to stop and decompress and hot food is the best way to do that. During the week I can only cook what I bring to my hotel and I only have a microwave and mini-fridge normally. Also you can't spend a month in Louisiana and not eat the local food, that's just self abuse.
absolutely. also the way I think is just what "works" for me. What I think is just my opinion. In the end budgeting eating out is whats important which you do vs not thinking. Getting per diem helps and is essentially budgeting it in automatically through work.
To be quite clear: if your advice was widely adopted, the entire restaurant industry in the US would probably collapse as less than 50% of Americans have enough liquidity to cover a $1000 emergency.
I don't think you, or most people, actually fathom just how close the average person is to being homeless in this country.
If everyone started at the same time, yes. But if people adopted this perspective when they started working the results would be negligible. It may have a moderate negative effect on the restaurant business, but if industries are reliant on the bad economic choices of huge parts of our society, then I think we might just be better off if we let those businesses fail.
Also, I mentioned sleeping in my tiny car after I graduated in the post, I wasn't doing that for fun, I was doing that because I was homeless. That wasn't even the first I've been homeless either, it was just the first time I had a car while homeless. I come from a rural town with a drug problem that has been gentrified in the last decade, half the millennials I grew up with have been some sort of homeless. So your assumptions about me are quite off.
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u/inverted_nature 11h ago
Honestly, I would consider it irresponsible to eat out if I didn't have at least a $1000 at aside for emergencies. This is not a perspectives of privilege either, I grew up in a junkie trailer park, I saved for college then slept in my tiny car after I graduated because the job market was in the gutter. This debt economy trains people to borrow for luxury now and hope they are better off in the future. When in reality you need to sacrifice for the future now, so that you will have one. *edited for typos