I’m a pretty avid follower of the “brown bag club” - I take my own lunch to work very regularly and have some soup at my desk for the days when leftovers aren’t present. However, there are simply some times where, for business or social reasons, I must eat out with others.

Here are seven techniques I use to minimize that cost to myself without disrupting the experience of the meal.

I drink a large amount of water just before leaving. This fills up my stomach quite nicely, and the signals from my stomach to my brain tell me I’m pretty full right about the time I’m ordering. This keeps me from ordering too much food.

I suggest carpooling. Even if I drive, I don’t mind it as much knowing that the cost for everyone goes down, and the driver usually rotates, which means I’m only paying for gas for a few of the meals I go to.

I order water as my drink (provided it’s free). Most restaurants provide free water, so I always utilize it as my beverage choice. This reduces the cost of the meal by quite a bit - basically, you pay literally dollars more for them to add sugar to your water.

If everyone else is drinking (which sometimes happens at evening dinners) I buy a single gin and tonic and sip it. No one notices that you’re not slamming them back, so just order one drink and go through it slowly. Not only is it far less expensive, it also has the advantage of keeping me sober and thus more able to participate intelligently in conversation. Aside from this, I just drink water with the meal.

I order something inexpensive but filling. Those are my two biggest criteria when dining out in such a situation. As I’ve mentioned before, I view eating out as a special experience, and a lunch with coworkers at Chili’s is not a special one. Thus, my focus is on minimizing my bill, and the best way to do that is to go for inexpensive and filling. The best place for that is usually the salad menu or the lunch special.

I participate strongly in the conversation. This distracts me from focusing too much on the food, which again keeps me from spending money on the meal. It’s also a way to challenge myself to work on my social skills, because by default I want to sit there and not say anything and stare at my plate. Even more important, it sometimes helps to build relations with others at the table.

I make sure I pass out my business card to anyone who doesn’t have it before I leave the table. This is true for almost any dinner I go to in a professional setting. I have an individual business card and I make sure that anyone I’m unfamiliar with - and especially anyone who hasn’t visited The Simple Dollar - gets one in their hand before they go. This increases the chance I have of them actually visiting the site later - and hopefully my writing will build on the foundation of a good impression.

In short, don’t look at business dinners as being more than a business proposition. Look to minimize your costs and maximize your potential profits so that you don’t end up with a big bill and nothing to show for it.

Given that I’m such a foodie and also frugal at the same time, several readers have written to me recently asking for tips on dining out. I collected some of my thoughts together and thus present this guide to how I eat out in such a way that my frugal sensibilities are in balance with my desire for exquisite food.

Eat out rarely, but do it right when you do. If I am going to be served food by someone else, I want to be an experience I will really remember. I generally find “sit down fast food” restaurants like Chili’s and Applebees (want to see what I mean?) to be an overpriced and preservative-laden version of what I can make at home.

Thus, rather than eating out every other week at a place like this, I save my nickels and dimes and eat out every three months or so at an exquisite local restaurant. I have enough available money to spend so that prices aren’t really an issue, either - I can share a bottle of wine with my wife if we choose to, for example. There are several outstanding restaurants in the greater Des Moines area, and I’d far rather drop $80-100 at one of those for a meal than drop $20 five times at other places.

Why? Even though this was my philosophy before having children, it’s even stronger now. I eat out for the experience, and the experience of dining at a top-notch restaurant is something I remember - I don’t remember trips to the IHOP, though I’ll eat at those places in a group setting without any problem.

Don’t worry about healthiness. If you eat out rarely, as I do, don’t spend your time worrying about finding the healthiest item on the menu. The rare occasion of eating out somewhere nice should be savored, thus I recommend chooing items that excite your palate above all.

I often find that the rare “blow my mind” meal is a great motivator for dieting. I plan a meal at an upscale restaurant a few months in advance and then use thoughts of that meal as a motivator all the way along. “I’ll eat really healthy today, and as a reward soon I’ll have that tremendous meal. Bring on the salad!”

The company makes all the difference. I enjoy eating out in small groups, but the company should be suitably enjoyable. If you’re going to eat out with someone and it’s not a fully comfortable situation, don’t eat out at a high-end place.

Life is a series of experiences, and it is the great ones that stick with us. I’m a firm believer in lining things up so events will be of the highest enjoyment possible - if you don’t enjoy the company, don’t go for the gusto with the meal. Stay at home, or eat at a simpler place.

Order water. Almost every restaurant will give you water for free. Order it. Sip it between bites. This is something I try to do at home as well for two reasons: it increases your enjoyment of the flavor of the food as the water cleanses your palate between bites, and it sates your appetite quicker, meaning you’re less likely to eat too much resulting in misery and weight gain.

Know a little bit about wine before you go in the door, so you can make your own choice if you order it. Quite often, the staff has a particular wine to “recommend,” which happens to be whatever wine there’s an abundance of in the back. Instead of going down that route, decide what you’re going to order first, then select a wine to complement that food.

As a thumbnail rule, the wine should match the color of the meat. Red wine for beef, white wine for poultry, fish, and pasta. Pork can go either way; I usually order a red with it, though. More specifically, I order a chardonnay with chicken or pork, a cabernet with steak (or other cuts of beef), sauvignon blanc with fish, and pinot grigio with pasta.

Leave a cash gratuity. Some people might be surprised by this, but it comes from personal experience at a restaurant. If you don’t do a cash gratuity, the restaurant sometimes scrapes it into their own profit coffers and the hardworking waiter you’re trying to tip gets only part of it - or sometimes nothing. One restaurant I am familiar with actually collects all tips, then gives a very small (almost insulting) “Christmas bonus” to all of the employees, which adds up to only a small fraction of the gratuities.

Thus, I try to make an effort to leave a cash gratuity, particularly if the service was very good. Often, I’ll note that on the receipt - I’ll write “cash” on the tip line and then write the total as being equal to the bill (I always pay by credit card at such places). Some places add the gratuity into the bill for you - something I don’t like - but most do not for a small party.

The most important thing of all? Enjoy the experience.

Recently, my wife and I have come to appreciate the huge amount of free community activities and entertainments available in our town. We used to find such things to be “lame,” but quite often that was a result of not knowing the huge array of things that were available to us and also a basic unwillingness to even try them out - we believed we knew better. Instead, we just found ourselves spending money on all sorts of activities when the truth was that things that were just as fun were available for free in our town.

Now, instead of going to a concert and spending a bunch of money on a ticket, we head to a park and listen to the community band. Instead of going out to eat, we can join up with a community potluck or drop a few dollars in the collection jar at a community fundraising dinner. Instead of burning an afternoon at a shopping mall buying junk we don’t need, we spend the day at a community festival. Instead of going to the theatre, we watch the high school class perform The Glass Menagerie. Not only is it cheaper, we get to know our locale in a much more personal fashion.

Now that we’re addicts of the community calendar, here are five great ways we’ve found to discover great community activities and entertainments in your town that are free or nearly so.

The local newspaper This is the most obvious place to look. Stop at a gas station and find the most local newspaper available. Almost all of them will have some sort of community calendar and at least an article or two about major upcoming community events. The articles are almost always of interest because they can describe an event in detail to you.

The visitor’s center Many towns (even some small ones) have a visitor’s center that can identify a lot of interesting activities and places to visit nearby. Even if you’ve lived in a place all of your life, a visitor’s center can still point out tons of interesting things to check out locally.

City hall Stop in at city hall and see what you can come up with. Many towns have a printed community calendar available in their city hall (or in another place that you can be directed to easily) with even more detail than what appears in the newspaper.

Chamber of commerce The local chamber of commerce can usually connect you to members of the community who can help you find all sorts of activities of interest. Before trying them, I expected that I would just be bombarded with commercial pitches, yet I have never found a chamber of commerce that wasn’t thrilled to point me towards community activities of all kinds.

The post office In small towns, believe it or not, the post office is the place to go for this kind of information. Not only is their bulletin board often jammed with notices of upcoming events, the postmaster almost always knows what’s going on - and if they don’t, they can point you right at someone to talk to. In my town, the postmaster was one of the most helpful people of all in terms of helping us discover the possibilities of the town.

The next time you’re tempted to go out on the town and drop some money on entertainment, take a bit of time and look around your town to see what sorts of free entertainments can be found. You may be surprised at the variety and depth of what’s available.

Inspired by Personal Finance Advice’s discussion of tipping, I felt that it was appropriate to discuss my own strategy for tipping, which revolves around one simple tenet: good service is the reason for tipping. I also don’t like to multiply on the fly in restaurants, so I use a strategy that minimizes the need to multiply.

First of all, no matter what, I tip 10% as a baseline. There could be some challenge in the life of the server that you don’t know about or any number of things going on that you are unaware of. A tip less than that is rude, particularly if you are a regular customer at a particular restaurant. Calculating this is easy: just move the decimal place to the left once.

If I am a regular customer, I automatically tip 5% more than that. A regular customer often develops a reputation at that establishment, and I wish to have a positive reputation as a customer. I want the servers to give preferential service to me because I’m a solid-to-strong tipper. To do this, I tack on an extra 5% to my tip by default. This 5% is easy to approximate; just give $1 per $20 on your order.

If the server performs service that I notice as being good, I tip an extra 5%. This usually means that the waitress was very unintrusive, silently and automatically refilling drinks without interfering. If I can’t remember any issues and I can’t remember the server interrupting except to get orders or bring food, this means that the service was good. Again, I just approximate by adding an extra dollar for every $20 on the order.

If the server performs above and beyond the call of duty, I tip an extra 10%. This usually involves handling some sort of disaster with grace, like a recent restaurant visit in which I accidentally dropped a full glass of lemonade on the tiled floor. Not only did the waitress handle this all gracefully, she personally mopped it up while we continued a dinner conversation. She earned a nice tip that day. Again, just move the decimal place once to the right.

If the server is new and performs adequately, I tip an extra 5%. Being a server at a busy restaurant is quite challenging, so when a new server is just getting the hang of it but still manages an adequate job, I give a little more. Again, I just approximate by adding an extra dollar for every $20 on the order.

If something beyond the pale happens, the sky’s the limit. When I was three, I once threw up on a waitress. She laughed it off. My parents tipped her 100%. She deserved it. When something crazy happens, don’t be afraid to tip a lot, especially if you plan on returning to the restaurant in the future.

Once you have these numbers, just add them up rounded to the nearest dollar and call it an adequate tip. I find this strategy works very well, particularly if you visit a restaurant regularly. We visit a couple local family dining chains and have had regular repeat waitresses; when this happens, we always get great service.

The biggest advantage that fast food has is that it is so easy and it saves time by allowing us to multi-task. On busy days, I can stop by a fast food restaurant and pick up a quick meal and eat it on the road as I hurry off to a meeting; it’s very difficult for a typical homemade meal to compete with that.

That is, until you discover the kitchen assembly line method.

The kitchen assembly line is basically the mass production of foods that can be easily grabbed and eaten at any time - in other words, food products similar to items sold at some fast food restaurants. These are stored in the freezer and can easily be microwaved and taken out the door with you as you rush off - or taken to work with you for lunch if you don’t have time to pack leftovers.

All you need to do to get started is to devote an afternoon to assembling these foods and some freezer space to store them. You don’t need any cooking skill beyond that of a typical fast food employee. The best part? These are always more healthy than the items you might buy at your typical fast food establishment.

Here are some ideas to get you started.

Breakfast
Breakfast Burritos: Buy a bunch of tortillas, some breakfast sausage, a jar of salsa, a dozen eggs, and some grated cheese. Cook the sausage up loosely and scramble the eggs. Put a bit of sausage and eggs on the tortilla, dump some cheese and eggs on top, wrap it up, and put it in Saran Wrap. Drop them right in the freezer.

Breakfast Sandwiches: Buy a bunch of English muffins or bagels (these freeze pretty well), some sliced cheese, and some eggs. Fry the eggs, breaking the yolk really early on, then put a fried egg and a slice of cheese on each English muffin or bagel. If you want, add a slice of Canadian bacon or something similar to each one. Wrap them in Saran wrap individually and drop them in the freezer.

Yogurt Pops These are great in the morning before a hot day. Mix together plain yogurt (two cups or so), some fruit (about half a cup of whatever you like), and eight ounces of your favorite fruit juice. Pour this into Dixie cups and stick ‘em in the freezer. Freeze them for 45 minutes or so, then insert a popsicle stick into the center of each one, then pop them back in the freezer until they’re solid. I really like these on summer mornings.

Lunch
Regular Burritos: Buy a bunch of tortillas, some meat of choice (chicken, pork, whatever), and some lettuce and tomatoes and salsa and refried beans and whatever else you’d like on a burrito. Cook the meat, then just assemble the burritos individually, wrap them in Saran wrap, and freeze away.

Quick Sandwiches: Buy some English muffins or bagels (these freeze well, but you can also use buns or bread), some cold cuts, and some matching cheeses. I like ham + swiss and roast beef + sharp cheddar; a friend of mine swears by muenster + cappicola. Make sandwiches as thick as you’d like, toss on any condiments you want, wrap them in Saran wrap, and freeze them. You can make hamburgers this way, too, of course.

Homemade Chicken Nuggets: These are so much better than fast food ones, it’s crazy. Cut up a few chicken breasts into one-inch pieces, then put some non-sweet cornflakes in a Ziploc bag and smash the cornflakes into oblivion with a rolling pin or your hands. Put the crumbs in a bowl and add a tablespoon of flour, a teaspoon of salt and pepper, and (optionally) some grated cheese (I like Parmesan). In another bowl, beat a couple eggs with a tablespoon of water until it’s all the same consistency. Dip the nuggets in the eggs, roll them on the crumbs, then put them on a pan and stick them in the oven at 375 F for thirteen minutes. Take ‘em out, let them cool, put several into a number of Ziploc baggies, and pop ‘em in the freezer.

Ready to eat?
With any of these, just grab them out of the freezer and microwave them for a minute or two and you’ll be ready to go. I often do this in the last moments before I leave so my final steps are hitting the microwave and then walking out the door.

The best part? If you make a bunch, you’ll have instant meals for a long time. They’re cheap and they’re way better for you than fast food.

Yesterday, I talked about the period in my life where my wife and I spent money like it was going out of style in order to obtain a “yuppie” lifestyle. Then, that magic moment happened: we took a home pregnancy test and discovered that a little one was on the way. I can remember that night like it was yesterday: we sat there excitedly holding each other’s hands and talking a hundred miles an hour about this child, our child, and what it all meant. I didn’t know it then, but this was to be the event that was the straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back.

The first mistake we made was insisting on only the “best” (read, most expensive) things for our child. We bought a ridiculously expensive crib, multiple layettes, multiple carseats, and so on and so forth. Perhaps the pinnacle of the overspending is when I had a slightly smaller duplicate of my own dresser made for him. We had this vision of a perfect little nursery in our heads and we were going to have it at any cost.

The little things added up as well. We bought him lots of toys, only to find out that free toys are often much more entertaining. We bought piles of wipes and diapers and such without understanding that we were spending our baby budget in nonsensical ways.

Now that we had all this stuff, we found out we were sorely unprepared for the day-in day-out costs of having a baby. Diapers, formula, wipes, clothes that he seems to outgrow every day; it’s a continuous cost that you’ve basically committed yourself to for, oh, the next eighteen years or so. We were completely unprepared for this new financial reality and we soon found that we didn’t have nearly as much money as before.

The lifestyle changes that the baby brought also brought a second wave of changes on us, and accounted for a second mistake: we spent money instead of coping with our lifestyle changes. For instance, we started eating take-out most every night simply because we were spending so much time with the baby and his night-time feedings were making us both worn out. We also travelled quite a lot when he was about three months old simply to show him off to others instead of inviting his many well-wishers to come and visit us, which would have been cheaper and more convenient but was alien to our lifestyle of showing off.

The real problem was that we were unable to separate what our child actually needed from what we wanted. We deluded ourselves into believing that buying all of this stuff for him was actually going to benefit him. The reality of the matter is that it doesn’t matter if it is a $50 crib or a $1000 crib, he’s still going to stand up in it and chew on the railing and he’s still not going to remember it when he’s four years old. The only difference that it makes is to us, so that we could feel some sort of parental glow when we saw it, but the child in the crib ended up counting for more than the crib ever did.

If you haven’t put the pieces together yet, things were just about to collapse. Bills were piling up left and right and it would only take a few things for the whole house of cards to collapse. Let’s just say you should tune in tomorrow for part eight in this series. It’s titled “Meltdown.”

Want to jump quickly to the other Road to Financial Armageddon posts? Here’s an index to help you out.

#1: The Earliest Mistakes
#2: Early Profits … Lost
#3: Cash & College
#4: The First Taste of Real Money
#5: Love & Marriage
#6: The Yuppie Years
#7: Here Comes Baby
#8: Meltdown
#9: The Road to Recovery
#10: What I Learned

That’s right, readers, I’m an idiot. There’s really not much more to say other than that. I am capable of coming up with some useful ideas and combining them into sensible plans, but in terms of putting them all together… well, the best I can say is that sometimes you have to learn from your own mistakes.

I thought it might be informative to keep track of everything I did this weekend and see what it amounted to from a financial standpoint. I started at Friday noon and went all the way through Sunday at bedtime to see what sort of financial impact my actions had. I wrote down pretty much every action in a little notebook, simply to keep track of them, with the intent of calculating them up later.

What follows is a list of the spending mistakes I managed to make in one weekend, and what they cost me. As Stephen Colbert would say, “It’s crumbelievable.”

Friday, 12:30 PM: I went out to lunch with some people I barely knew who invited me. Meanwhile, I had brought my own lunch and left it in the fridge. I sat at lunch listening to these people talk to each other about each other and barely made a peep. Money lost: $10.12

Friday, 5:30 PM: At the store, I ran into an old friend. He encouraged me to go drink a beer with him and get caught up on old times. My initial reaction was to say no, but I went ahead and went. I listened to his sob story over two beers, bought his beers for him, then played an hours’ worth of darts with him. Money lost: $25.00

Friday, 8:00 PM: I went home and started making supper when I realized we were out of milk, even though I was literally next to a grocery store just a half an hour earlier. I had to run to the local grocery store (wasting gas) and buy overpriced milk to finish making supper. Money lost: $3.00

Saturday, 3:00 PM: My wife talks me into going out this evening for dinner and a movie, against my better judgement. We call up our babysitter and she’s available, so I get enough cash to pay the babysitter. Money lost: $30.00

Saturday, 5:30 PM: The restaurants we normally go to are quite full, so we wind up at an overpriced restaurant with rather bad food. At the end of the meal, I remarked that I would rather have eaten at a local cafeteria or at home, and my wife didn’t entirely disagree. Money lost: $50.00

Saturday, 7:35 PM: We attended an early evening showing of Borat (which we both loved, by the way), replete with a shared large Diet Coke. Money lost: $18.25

Saturday, 10:00 PM: We stopped on the way home from the movie to look at the stars for a while and remember our days when we were first dating… the least expensive and best part of the weekend. Money lost: $0.00

Saturday, 11:00 PM: I was so tired when we got home that I accidentally paid the babysitter $10 too much. Money lost: $10.00

Sunday, 1:00 PM: We forgot our list before grocery shopping and my wife didn’t want to drive back to get it, so we massively overspent at the grocery store. Money lost: $25.00

Sunday, 4:00 PM: While making a bottle, I knocked an almost completely full can of baby formula into the sink. Money lost: $21.89

What can we conclude from this adventure? First, just look at the total. Right there, down below, all on its own.

$193.26

This weekend, my bad spending habits combined with my lack of resolve and my own clumsiness cost me almost two hundred dollars. Like I said at the top, I’m an idiot.

I guess I can take some solace in the fact that I can at least recognize the mistakes I made.

For many of us busy people, breakfast can often become a thing in the past, something we leave out during a hectic morning. Then, in the middle of a busy morning at work, we begin to hit a little speed bump - we feel a bit tired, or our stomach starts really growling, and our eyes look to the clock, wondering when lunch is. By the time lunch arrives, we’re ravenous.

That was me, at least, until I realized that I needed to start eating breakfast. I was worried that it would cost me money, because I’d have to start buying food to eat in the morning. But the surprising part was when I looked at my finances a month after starting on breakfast: I had saved quite a bit of money!

Here’s why. Without breakfast, by the time lunch rolled around, I was very hungry and not thinking rationally about food. I’d go out with co-workers or eat somewhere expensive by myself. After I started eating breakfast each morning, I was much more level-headed come lunchtime and able to make more sensible dining choices. Right there, I began to save an average of $3 a weekday on lunch.

But it was still expensive; I often stopped on my way into work for something to eat, and that was costing me more than the $3 each day I spent on lunch. That’s when the “second rule of breakfast” became clear: eat something small at home before you go. I began to eat a container of yogurt every day before leaving for work, which cost $0.40, and this had the same effect of reducing my hunger at lunch. Overall, I was saving about $2.50 a day.

Of course, this still meant that I was spending too much money eating out each day, but that’s another problem to solve.