Tag: dining out

One big reason Americans are broke and overweight

Via Marketwatch

Dining out is weighing on our budgets.

The No. 1 thing Americans bust their budget on is dining out, according to research released by financial company Principal. Nearly one in three Americans (29%, up from 26% last year) said that this was this year’s top budget buster for them, followed closely by food/groceries (27%). And research released Monday by financial company Fidelity found that the No. 1 small financial mistake Americans admit to is dining out too much, with 36% saying they’d done that in the past year.

Government data shows that Americans spent nearly $3,500 a year on dining out in 2018 — a 2.8% increase just from the year prior. And restaurant sales are projected to hit a record high this year of $863 billion, according to the National Restaurant Association. What’s more, as MarketWatch reported in July of this year, “the cost of going out to eat or getting takeout food is rising a lot faster than the cost of buying groceries.”

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This is why Americans are overweight and broke

I consider money wasted eating out as the biggest reason people have no retirement savings. Ten or twenty dollars per week saved rather than spent over the course of thirty years adds up to a large amount of money. The continued overspending in this category is reflected in the fact that restaurant/bar retail spending has remained one of the few bright spots in the last year. I contend this is due to the fact people are depressed by their awful wage growth and growing expenditures for healthcare, so they are eating and drinking to drown their sorrows.

“Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die!” Isaiah 22:13

The wasting of money on “other consumer goods” is the category that really jumped. This is where the iGadgets and other tech related crap falls. We are amusing ourselves and eating ourselves to death.

Guest Post by Catey Hill

Down to your last belt loop and your last penny? These seemingly unrelated phenomena may have more in common than you think, a new survey shows.

Dining out is the No. 1 thing that Americans blow their budgets on, according to the Principal Financial Group’s annual Financial Well Being Index, which will be released Wednesday (MarketWatch got an early look at the data). The company surveyed more than 1,100 employed American adults.

Those restaurant meals are also adding to our growing waistlines: On days when people dine out, they tend to consume 200 more calories than when they eat at home, according to a study of more than 12,500 people published by Public Health Nutrition last year, and government research shows that “when eating out, people either eat more or eat higher calorie foods — or both — and that this tendency appears to be increasing.” Other studies show that eating out more frequently is associated with obesity and higher body fat.

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