If you think you can eat out with a family of four for $70/day in the city, you are sorely mistaken.
When I eat downtown with my family the bill is rarely below $100 with tax and tip for dinner, and that’s a single meal, with no drinks (tap water), and no dessert.
Even some place like B.GOOD (higher quality fast food) is going to be $50 unless it’s a “Kids eat Free” night.
My point is a family of 4 can easily spend $50 at the grocery store for 12 meals in a day without being exorbitant.
And that’s assuming the two working adults are brown-bagging it at lunch every day and not eating out lunch with team members at least a couple times a week.
So $70/day gives you room to eat out as a family maybe once a week, not daily. (No way a family with a 2 and 4 year old are doing that, but that’s kinda besides the point)
Of course there are people who claim they eat like a king for $5/day. And I don’t doubt it’s possible, but I doubt it’s common for a middle class family of 4 living in the city who are probably paying Amazon to deliver their groceries.
I think it's reasonable to spend ~$11/person/day if you're mostly not cooking, and not economizing, based on firsthand experience. I mean, I understand that you can do math like "fast food meal costs $13, multiplied by 3, equals $39/person/day". But it just doesn't seem to work out like that, so something in your estimating logic is way off.
People's memories and estimates are often unreliable, but if you use one credit card for everything and it tallies your spending on restaurants, that's pretty definitive.
$11 eating out, in a major US city, for the whole day? Breakfast, lunch, and dinner? Did I read that wrong?
Breakfast at Flour (egg sandwich, and a late) is going to run you $12, assuming you don’t buy that brownie for later. That salad at Sweetgreens is $15. Just the salad. Juice is charging $14 for a 16oz protein shake. We haven’t even made it to dinner yet.
Yes, I'm not disputing what a meal is going to cost, "major" city or not. For instance, I had a sandwich, drink, and a cookie at a non-chain casual-not-extremely-fast-food place, and it was about $16 with tip. If I get something cheap, where there's no tipping, it's still probably going to be near $10. On the weekend, sure, dinner for two might cost $100, never mind a large family. Might be leftovers though.
My point is that doesn't mean you average three times a typical meal price per day over a long period of time. And the reason I'm so sure is because I have the records which show I don't.
Maybe it's just laziness/time constraints. I can't possibly get up early enough every day to have a large meal, even if I could stomach it. And I only get half an hour for lunch on workdays.
My point is the relationship of averages to salient data points. Like I mentioned in my other post, it seems like I'm always going 40-60 mph, but my trip computer says my average is a lot less, and the average is very consistent no matter what kind of driving I seem to have been doing. Or, another example is time estimates, where short tasks are consistently underestimated, because it's human nature to ignore short delays/overhead.
$50 gets you two 16oz steaks (two adults can each eat too much steak for lunch AND dinner with that) and 15 or 20 _pounds_ of fresh vegetables at whole foods in the 94107 zip code according to Prime Now. And that's not even accounting for the umpty servings of dry goods like rice and legumes you get per dollar. What do you consider exorbitant? How much food can you eat in a day?
potatoes, $0.79/lb (tired of making imgur links now)
eggplants, $1.69/lb
zucchini, $2/lb
roma tomatoes, $1.49/lb
long grain brown rice (rice freshly delivered from Whole Foods instead of from somewhere saner!), $1.20/lb
Of course if you only ever buy the most expensive items and don't fill out your meals, then yes it gets expensive. But not being price sensitive in any way when shopping is like the very definition of being upper class.
> 2 pounds of steak before cooking isn’t lunch and dinner for two adults
You know that a proper meal isn't _just_ steak, though, right? Brown rice, legumes, vegetables, 8oz meat, spices. 2 Steaks, 2 people, 2 meals.
Groceries from Amazon Prime/Whole Foods is like estimating commuting costs using Uber. I just can't believe people live like that, or not for long. Nobody has a steak for every meal, or even every day, either.
Also, has anybody questioned that charity amount? That's like 1%. Like, you're making $300K and you can't afford 10%?
Of course you spend a lot of money to eat out, but you don't do that every single day. Even when you hardly cook, you don't have a sit down meal at a restaurant that charges $25/person every day.
If I think about the speed I'm usually driving my car, it seems like it's generally 50-60 mph, yet the trip computer consistently says I average half that. Because mentally, I don't weight all the time I spend not going full speed as highly.
I think a lot of the budget items are inflated in the same way - the monthly amount sounds like an amount you could spend in a month, but nobody would spend that much every month in perpetuity.
When I eat downtown with my family the bill is rarely below $100 with tax and tip for dinner, and that’s a single meal, with no drinks (tap water), and no dessert.
Even some place like B.GOOD (higher quality fast food) is going to be $50 unless it’s a “Kids eat Free” night.