[Diggity]

I am going to take the controversial stance and say BS to this one.

With Americans marrying later and often times dual income even then this has left most individuals doing 1.5 jobs (house work and their actual job)

Additionally the time required to access to the basics has also gone up. Super markets are more crowded. Traffic is much worse.

This has left Americans with a drastic reduction in time and created large amounts of time pressure stress.

The major advantage of eating out is a massive reduction in stress related to food prep, particularly around time savings and mental energy expenditure.

Now eating out is not on average healthy, but not all meals that are prepared at home are either. When faced with equivalently unhealthy meals, dining out has the advantage of automatic portion control.

The REAL reason American's are broke is cost of living. Rent and housing costs have skyrocketed and wages have stagnated.

Coupled with a reduction in time and increased time-stress taking care of every day chores, health goes out the window.

In short, there is a direct correlation between health and wealth. Specifically, if one partner earns enough to support a relatively unstressed house mom/dad, the family unit is healthy.

Otherwise if an individual earns a large sum of money with sufficient few hours, they have compound time benefits in other aspects of their lives allow for health considerations.

[ChrisLomont]

>The REAL reason American's are broke is cost of living. Rent and housing costs have skyrocketed and wages have stagnated.

Inflation adjusted housing costs have not risen much over time [1].

If you don't account that housing now is vastly bigger than before you lose this fact.

Here's [2, Figure 5] a shorter timespan, showing that the ratio of income to housing payment has remained essentially flat 1985-2005.

Nothing in any of this data supports skyrocketing costs. If you're going to claim it's skyrocketed in small pockets, then yes, it has, but over that same window it's crashed in some pockets.

[1] https://www.huduser.gov/portal/publications/pdf/Trends_hsg_c...

[2] https://www.huduser.gov/portal/publications/pdf/Trends_hsg_c...

[ChrisLomont]

For those interested, average house sizes look like this over time [1].

Here is inflation adjusted housing price per square foot over time [2]. It is not much different for anytime in the past 100ish years as far as I can find from various datasets.

[1] http://www.newser.com/story/225645/average-size-of-us-homes-...

[2] http://www.aei.org/publication/new-us-homes-today-are-1000-s...

[wvenable]

I agree with this assessment; in my family we try to eat in as much as possible but short about of time and the stress was becoming a big problem.

We recently started using one of those ingredient/recipe delivery services and it has drastically reduced the stress. The meals are quite good and my kitchen skills are improving quite a bit. The downside is the cost is greater than shopping for your own meals.

[maxxxxx]

"When faced with equivalently unhealthy meals, dining out has the advantage of automatic portion control."

Portions in restaurants are way too big. After a while this totally skews your perception of appropriate amounts of food.

[flyinghamster]

No kidding there, and more than once it has bitten me. Spend enough time eating restaurant meals, and a sane portion size soon seems way too small, unless you're disciplined enough to chop your portions in half and bring the rest home.

Pay-by-the-weight buffets (as opposed to all-you-can-eat) seem to offer me the best way to control portions and get a variety of healthy things to eat without the prep hassle, but it still costs a good deal more than it does for me to make my own meals.

[nicolashahn]

That depends on your activity level. When I was working out 5x a week, I'd want two of the most calorie-packed things on the menu.

[maxxxxx]

Sure. I'd venture a guess that maybe 1% of restaurant users have the problem of needing as many calories as possible. Everybody else needs much less.

[ip26]

From my broke college student mentality, they are too small for what you pay. You want twenty bucks for three hundred calories?

[rofo1]

Yeah, in particular:

"Government data shows that in 2017 American spent more than $3,300 a year on dining out"

Can spending 3300$ yearly result in being broke?

[ChrisLomont]

Depends on their income and other commitments. If someone has a budget, it's presumably for a reason. If eating out is the #1 cause of breaking a budget, then it certainly can be the piece that sends them into other budget problems.

[ThrowawayR2]

Median income in, for example, Detroit was $58,411 in 2017. Post-taxes that would be $45,484. $3300 is about 7.3% of that so, yeah, that's a pretty hefty bite.

[jimktrains2]

Even assuming the median earner is paying the average for eating out (e.g. is a blue collar family of 4 in the Midwest spending the same proportional to income eating out as a childless professional couple on the coast? I'd wadger no.), you still need to compare that against the cost of groceries. So, it's more of an additional 3%-5% in reality, not a whole 7%.

[jandrewrogers]

This is only around 20-25% of the median discretionary income in the US i.e. money available for savings after all ordinary expenses. So while it can have a significant impact on savings rate, I would agree that it is misleading to state that this will make you "broke".

Being broke requires spending the other 75-80% of discretionary income too, and that is a much larger pool of money.