When I was saving for the down payment of my condo, one of the biggest changes I made was making my own lunch, rather than eating out every day.
There are going to be regional differences of course, but here in SF, a modest lunch costs at least $20. My average was around $25, or about $6500/year.
I adopted "meal prep Sundays" where I make all of my lunches for the week ahead, and the average cost is consistently around $5, making my annual weekday lunch cost about $1300. +$5200/year post tax to be used on other things.
Applying the same general idea to dinner unlocks further savings.
The funny thing is - I don't know that I'm even sacrificing time with this approach either. It takes me maybe 1.5 hours on Sunday for the lunch prep thing, but I'm saving a bunch of time by not physically going to restaurants, ordering, taking deliveries, etc. The variety is lacking with this approach, but the tradeoff is well worth it in my book.
I'm going to make some assumptions, so please forgive me if this is not accurate. You said you were in San Francisco and looking to buy property, so I'll guess you were probably a Senior Software Engineer at the time, based on presumed age and Hacker News demographic/location.
The median wage for that position and region is $295,000/year according to levels.fyi [1]. I happen to also live in the same city with the same job title, so I can confirm anecdotally this feels about right. It might have been lower back when you were saving though. Not sure how long ago this was, but let's roll with it.
5200 / 295000 = ~%1.8 of your gross income.
I'm a bit doubtful that you were able to prepare a week's worth of food in just 1.5 hours, including shopping and cleaning, but if so, that's incredibly efficient. Let's assume 16 waking hours per weekend day.
1.5 / (16 + 16) = ~4.7% of your weekend.
So very roughly speaking, we're looking at a marginal difference of saving around 1/50th of your income at the expense of around 1/20th of your free time. Personally I feel that's not worthwhile, and in my case the numbers are actually more stark.
This of course does not factor in the non-zero time to go out for lunch. This could significantly change the calculus. We're also not including non-financial factors which might play in.
There are going to be regional differences of course, but here in SF, a modest lunch costs at least $20. My average was around $25, or about $6500/year.
I adopted "meal prep Sundays" where I make all of my lunches for the week ahead, and the average cost is consistently around $5, making my annual weekday lunch cost about $1300. +$5200/year post tax to be used on other things.
Applying the same general idea to dinner unlocks further savings.
The funny thing is - I don't know that I'm even sacrificing time with this approach either. It takes me maybe 1.5 hours on Sunday for the lunch prep thing, but I'm saving a bunch of time by not physically going to restaurants, ordering, taking deliveries, etc. The variety is lacking with this approach, but the tradeoff is well worth it in my book.