I hate when wealthy people give this advice to regular people that are trying to improve their finances. Unless you are massively in debt or you just enjoy cooking, buying food outside home is one of the few things regular people can do to to BUY TIME.
When you start factoring buying groceries, cooking, washing the dishes, cleaning the kitchen, etc. It is a huge amount of time that you’re expending every week on something that ultimately you don’t enjoy. I’d rather pay 100% more and spend time with my family or hobbies.
I understand is less viable when you have kids, but I still think you should take advantage of it when you can.
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More of a murdered by words posting, but I can see the unpopularity angle
Rich people that come from old money always have the best advice for average people.
Bro really said “I’m saving time” while bleeding money on takeout 😂 nah man, cooking takes 30 mins, eating out costs 3-5x more. If you’re broke, it’s literally the first thing you cut. This ain’t efficiency, it’s financial self-sabotage.
complete nonsense.
eating out does not buy or save you any time at all, quite the opposite, it wastes your time. its highly inefficient and creates more movement in your life. saving time is about increasing efficiency, this means less wasted movement.
if your really concerned with saving time, you prep all your meals at home when your at home and then take them with you as needed. you consolidate cooking to one moment and then don’t cook the rest of the week. or for a few days.
highly efficient people don’t waste time traveling back and forth.
Take my upvote, unpopular indeed. Eating out costs 10 times as much as eating in sometimes. Smh
Even going out takes a lot of time. It just feels less like it. Cooking, eating, and cleaning up is actually pretty comparable to traveling somewhere, waiting for your food, and traveling back, at least once you have practice cooking.
If you really want to save time, you should get into meal prepping. It has an initial higher time investment, but takes the least amount of time when going by number of hours a week.
OTH going out to eat is one of the highest cost items you have direct control over.
Heating bill? Sure you can run the heat lower but it’s not going to drop it that much.
Phone / Internet bill? It is what it is.
Car insurance / payment etc. It is what it is.
Rent / Mortgage? It is what it is.
You aren’t even close to the sharpest knife in the drawer.
As someone who doesn’t have a dishwasher, I totally agree.
If you’d rather pay “100% more” you’re not trying to save…
Buying time and saving money are two different things. Eating out is costly and adds up quickly. If you’re trying to save, it absolutely should be one of the first things cut.
I can have a banging dish on the table by the time I’m at the restaurant before I’ve even ordered.
This dish will most definitely be 50% cheaper at the least and I’ve done the dishes within 15min.
So I disagree wholeheartedly, have my upvote.
my husband and i used to order takeout a lot, but we broke that habit and have actually saved hundreds more each month. i don’t mind spending more time to cook, i actually love cooking, learning new recipes and finding new ingredients to try while i am shopping. it’s fun!
That advice is meant for you to save money. And eating at home together, cleaning up together are also done, ynow, with your family.
Eating out costs more and is relatively less healthy which in the long run costs a shit ton of money, and time too.
Cooking isnt as time consuming as you make it out to be. Also you know what you’re eating as opposed to a restaurant order.
Nah I recently cut going out to eat out of my budget and my finances got better overnight, like way better this is crazy advice for working class people
I get where you’re going with this, but it’s nore relevabt in my case. My “dinner” takes about 6 minutes, i take out whatever i have in the fridge, eat upright by the sink and put it back in. I haven’t set up a table or done dishes in 10+ years.
Even cooking most of my family’s meals at home, food is our biggest expense through the year.
If you’re eating out a lot, that probably is a good place to cut back first if you’re trying to save money. If you only eat out every once in a while anyway I don’t think this advice is for you.
Nah, those advices in general kinda suck. “Don’t eat out, quit smoking, don’t get starbucks everyday” but that won’t help people that already don’t eat out, never smoked and don’t even drink coffee.
Rationalization is a powerful thing.
Menu planning: 20 minutes.
Shopping; 1 hour. Less if you just use a shopping app and have the food ready to pick up.
Cooking: 45 minutes.
Cleaning: 15 minutes if you clean while you cook. Seriously. Try it.
Further, make enough food so you can eat it for lunch the next day as leftovers. Then you save enough money for your hobbies.
This is only true if you have absolutely no time and are converting money into time. Like you have a deadline so you stay up all night getting the thing done and order pizza. All other times you are exchanging extra money for that time which is also time. Like if you make ten dollar an hour and buy lunch for 15 you lost and hour and a half of time which had you been working would be in your wallet. And it costs more money (time) to pay for the food than you’d lose by doing it yourself. Otherwise why would the restaurant do it if it was such a clever trick? Obviously the place that makes the food isn’t losing money so it couldn’t be that bad of a deal. What you’re doing right now is justifying wasting money on treats which is fine but you should know that you’re doing it. It takes barely any time to make a sandwich or whatever anyway.
I think you’ve just gotta make it into something fun. Do the grocery shopping with a friend. Turn it into a ‘Chopped’ style challenge. Personally I meal prep so I’m only really cooking once a week, so I make it into a relaxing event. I make myself a nice breakfast with a coffee that has way too much syrup in it, listen to NPR while I cook, take photos of all the goodies I make…
Eating out isn’t sustainable all the time financially, and unless you’ve got some dang good restaurants it’s also probably gonna wreck your health. Upvoted for unpopular tho
cooking food does not take that much time, takeout and eating out is like 3 to 4 times what it would be if you just made it yourself, its an unnecessary luxury and one of the first things you should get rid of when youre tight on cash.
You just don’t know how to buy and prep food efficiently. I can have meals prepped for a month in a single afternoon of actual prep work. The actual cooking can be pretty passive, e.g. crock pot or oven.
If you’re eating the cheapest things on the value menu with the highest calorie bang for your buck to achieve not starving, and you’re not accounting for future health issues robbing you of money and time–maybe.
I batch cook shredded chicken breast once every 2 weeks in my instant pot and freeze single-serving portions and alternate between chicken salad sandwiches and a green salad with chicken and a slice of toast for dinner each week night. The time (and money) investment is small.
Anyway here is your up vote
This ain’t unpopular it’s just wrong
Are you earning money with the time you saved? If yes then you have a point.
If no, which is going to be the case for most people, then no.
eh. if it brings you great joy, have it once a week. everybody has their own thing they don’t want to compromise on and makes them happy.
Go to aldi, buy some sandwhich crap, some meat, some bread, some noodles (spaghetti, rotini or ramen), and some frozen stuff, and stop hemorrhaging money.
there are times where eating out can save time compared to cooking, but I feel like that’s only if you’re cooking complex meals that take lots of dishes
and in that case, cook simpler stuff instead of going out and spending way more
Someone doesn’t like that they were called out for calling their taco a taxi.
If you’re trying to save, you do not have the money to more than double your food budget. You’re not even saving that much time because you’re driving off to wherever to get this food. Since you don’t have a family, your dishes will take five minutes at most, with there being plenty of ways to reduce cooking time if you are actually trying to save.
Unless you’re actively turning that time into some sort of progress, financial/educational/physical this is not only an unpopular opinion its just plain bad, the whole ‘Spend time for hobbies and family’ goes against the core idea of saving money here. So yeah, hate wealthy people giving advice all you want, this one is spot on a good reccomandation for saving money as well as developing yourself by making meals, learning how to purchase, ration, etc.
Eating out is a luxury you are paying someone else to do something you could do cheaper
And all this delivery service another luxury
I had a family member tellung me about this fancy restaurant he went to then complain when bills came in but never equated the two
All eating out costs is time and maybe your previously good breath.
Going out to eat is among the biggest discretionary waste of money. Completely not needed and you pay too much for it.
If you enjoy it and have the means, cool. But money can be spent in more responsible ways.
Have you ever heard of meal prepping? Or leftovers? I feed 4-6 people homemade meals nightly for dinner, but rarely do I cook more than three days a week… because I cook enough food for multiple meals at a time.
And honestly, you’re not saving more time by eating out vs eating in. It takes the same amount of time to order and wait for your food as it does to actually cook it.
If being in the kitchen is so laborious, add a tv. Watching stupid comedians how get through the bulk of my cooking.
You can make a lot of food extremely fast with little clean up
Where I live, one meal from a takeaway place is $20-30. That’s my WEEKLY grocery budget, sometimes fortnightly. Yeah no I’m gonna cook at home actually
…what?
Cooking is definitely faster than going out all the time…
People should focus more on making more. Your time is better spent delivering value efficiently in your area of expertise.
If you meal prep you can be saving time AND money 🥰
is it really an opinion if its just probably wrong?
Just say you don’t know how to cook bro.
“I’d rather pay 100% more and spend time with my family or hobbies.”
I’d rather have zero credit card debt, have zero student loan debt, have zero medical debt, pay my bills on time, have an adequate emergency fund, drive safe and reliable cars, have a safe and comfortable place to live, have high-quality health care, and have an appropriate amount of money saved and invested for retirement.
noodles + different sauces. rice cooker recipes. anything that goes into the oven
infinitely less time consuming and several times cheaper than eating out.
country dependent ofc. in asia, eating out makes much more sense financially
For my family of 3, eating out anywhere is over $50 for fast food…easily over $75 anywhere else.
$75 spend very selectively at Walmart and the dollar store can last over a week.
No offense but did you get dropped as a kid?
This is why poor people stay poor.
When my bf is around, we research meals, different cooking methods, and spend the evening trying new dishes or have our weekly steak night (that always has rotating sides). When he’s gone? I’ll eat a piece of cheese and call it good. Lol.
Cooking, for us, is such a wonderful sharing of the experience. Nice restaurants are always cool. But we like the togetherness aspect of cooking.
I can cook a meal in less time than it takes me to go get take out. I still do a take out once a week or so because I just don’t want to cook every night.
You need to prep food and not eat out. It would take a couple hours 1 day per week.
Bro has no idea how to budget
This the mentality that keeps some people poor lol
The reality is that most people don’t make enough per hour to justify eating out versus cooking in if their goal is to save money, so buying time is not an argument that works here.
No this is just dumb. If you’re poor, your time is not what you’re trying to save.
Bad take and flat out wrong
The reason this is an unpopular opinion is because it’s just wrong. And stupid.
Yes let me spend 30$ on eating out instead of using that money to buy ingredients for 3 days.
Meal prep
What??? I can meal prep 8 buritos with 15 minutes of total actual labour. Eating out even once would take longer then that. Even if I got takeout the travel time would still take longer.
You can cook a lot of lovely meals very quickly once you learn to cook properly.
You buy time, when your time is actually worth something. When you make 10-15-20 euros or whatever per hour you don’t ” buy time” you just stop spending.
Its ok to lie to yourself, but eating out is the easiest thing to cut and a huge money savings compared to cooking at home, its not even close.
I don’t consider myself wealthy. Take my advice, stop eating out and save money.
I can cook, eat and clean away something faster than it takes to go out for even the fastest of fast foods. what an unbelievably dumb post.
$20-30 on one meal. Or $20-30 on meal prep to give me dinner for 5 to 7 days. Eating out goes first
Delivery/eating out are some of the highest cost/time activities a normal person can do regularly, so this is inaccurate, not unpopular. Justify it however you like, but meal prepping in particular takes considerably less time per meal and costs between one-third to one-tenth what eating out does. It’s not saving you time or money.
lol no. eating out is the first thing to remove.
stop crying, you just suck at cooking.
This is why I want there to be an entrance test for people to be allowed to post online.
It’s because cooking a meal at home is vastly cheaper than eating out. If you’re trying to save money it is an easily switch to make.
It can save time in the moment. But if your goal is to get out of debt, not eating out is a great way to put money back in your pocket. Be thoughtful when you do go grocery shopping to plan meals ahead so when you do make a batch of something, it was cost-effective, hopefully healthy, and saves you time in the moment the rest of the week with a grab and go option.
Once you have got out of debt, and can afford to go out to eat without batting an eye, yes, it does save time… but they aren’t trying to get out of debt either.
Takeout was one of the first things to go on my budget. So far I’ve saved $100-200 a month and I’ve lost 10 pounds. Any food you can think of that a restaurant makes, you can make it yourself cheaper and healthier.
Isn’t money a representation of the time owed to us by society? So that time you “save” (which other have good arguments against) is spent at work, so why not work less and cook at home? If you compound the 2 factors the average earner is spending way more time in going out.
Very unpopular. I don’t enjoy cooking but what do I care if it takes half an hour. Unless it was time I should have been working? I made dinner tonight (which will be lunch tomorrow and probably another dinner in a couple of days) and I just did it with my son. Kept getting him to ‘help’ me with it. He put the rice and the veg into pots and then I put chicken in an air fryer. Maybe 10 mins of actual effort (less if I did it myself) and most of it was just time with my son.
I think for most people, ‘eating out’ either means unhealthy food, or going out somewhere that’s going to turn a meal into an expensive 2 hour round trip. I’d rather be healthy, richer and teaching my kids good habits and life skills.
Not an opinion. You’re factually incorrect.
It really just depends what you’re willing to change in order to retain more money.. if you have set a goal, it’ll just take longer the more vices you have and avoid altering.
Specifically this topic..none of that really take much time once you get patterns/routines down. Make a grocery list based on how your grocery is set up. You could be in and out in 15-30 mins a week.
Cleaning the kitchen isn’t bad if you’re neat while cooking.
If cooking is taking too much time.. meal prep like others have stated. Or cook meals that could last a few days, in quantity.
I feel your opinion is more broadly about how many people will have different priorities in life and take statements/suggestions personally when a change to their priority is threatened.
DIY takes more time… usually. But it’s cheaper, usually.
Karma farming crap, no sane person with any life experience would think this is correct.
I tried this for several months. Ate a lot of McDonald’s and grocery store fried chicken. It may have saved time and only cost a little more (realistically 3-4x as much) but I felt AWFUL. The food you get out is just so much worse than what you can make at home.
Eating out is absolutely the first thing to cut out if you’re poor! Yesterday I went to order penn station, 29$ for one regular sub, I made an egg sandwich instead in less time than it’d take to just order to food.
Meal prep and plan ahead, buy what’s on sale that week. We got ourselves out of poverty, live real comfortably, and I can tell you that we still rarely eat out because it’s so much quicker and tastier at home. Plus the social aspect of being in a home instead of a loud restaurant helps.
People will say anything
What? This is a really unpopular opinion. I don’t know a single person that eats out more than 2-3x a month anyway. Growing up, we went to restaurants maybe twice a year, my parents still only do this on birthdays/special occasions. Eating out is definitely not the default where I live. It’s also more expensive than cooking, takes more time than cooking, is less healthy (usually).
>I hate when wealthy people give this advice to regular people that are trying to improve their finances.
It’s not just wealthy people who give this advice, and even if it did come from a wealthy person it doesn’t make it bad advice.
>Unless you are massively in debt or you just enjoy cooking, buying food outside home is one of the few things regular people can do to to BUY TIME.
Not really, unless when you talk about eating out you mean going to a fast food place. If you go to a proper sit down restaurant you’re not going to be saving much time, if any at all, when you factor in travel and waiting times.
>When you start factoring buying groceries, cooking, washing the dishes, cleaning the kitchen, etc. It is a huge amount of time that you’re expending every week on something that ultimately you don’t enjoy.
Have you never heard about meal prepping? Saves a lot of time.
>I’d rather pay 100% more and spend time with my family or hobbies.
Eating out costs more than double than it does cooking at home, so if you eat out all the time you’re not going to have the money or time to spend with you family or hobbies.
Everything costs either time or money. You have to choose which.
If your money is limited, it’s better to spend time and save money, because there’s no way to replace the money you spent, and it could be used for other things.
If your money is unlimited, or your time is highly valuable, it’s better to spend money and save time.
This is why it makes financial sense for a rich celebrity or businessman to have a private chef, but it makes sense for you to cook at home
First thing. It’s easy enough to do a one pot meal
So save time on cooking and spend that time working to pay for take out. And later use that time trying to address years of accumulated negative health outcomes.
That is a very sad self-licking ice cream cone.
I think you’re right, but definitely not a popular opinion.
Some people don’t want to eat the same meal every day for a month. Some people don’t have a large kitchen or good pots or fridge space to cook a lot in advance. Some people hate cooking. There are cheap and fast food places. Even if not fast, the meal can be a meeting of friends and now you’ve combined times, especially if you live in a tiny room with no space to host friends. The meal can still be cheap if a person doesn’t end up drinking tons of alcohol with it.
it should be the first lol
I am so grateful to have spent the majority of my life living more than thirty miles from any fast food, or even stores open past 7 p.m..
This isn’t unpopular, this is just stupid. Of course money buys you time. But if you don’t have money, what should you cut instead? Health? Shelter? Car if you live in place with bad public transportation? Most important information is missing – don’t cut this expense, it’s important – but won’t tell which one isn’t, as IMHO all the others are even more important.
There are ways to eat cheap while eating out – splitting a bowl with your partner at Chipotle or Pollo Tropical, ordering from the value menu at Taco Bell or the app from McDonalds, getting a $7 pizza from a national chain, etc – but most people don’t do these things.
They order $20pp take out, go to mid-tier restaurants and get a beer/drink, or even splurge once a week on some celebrity chef style restaurant or bistro in their neighborhood.
As a loner, I find that it’s basically the same cost for me to eat out 2 meals a day as opposed to grocery shopping and cooking for myself.
For example. Pasta with sausage and red sauce. Pasta – $2
Sausage – $4
Parm – $0.75
Sauce – $3
Butter/ect. $0.50
Total – $10.25
Chipotle chicken burrito – $12
Obviously these numbers are made up estimates, educated guess with some harsh math to roughly estimate.
That doesn’t save any time nor does it save money once you have a basic understanding of cooking and meal planning.