One of the things that I’ve really been trying to get more of a handle on lately is how much money I/we spend on socializing with our friends. Before BF and I got together, and even for the first few months, I spent a lot of time out with my friends, and he spent a lot of time in playing video games with his friends. As time went by, we’ve managed in a lot of ways to really integrate our friend groups, and now, its not uncommon at all to have a group of 15-20 people out, some of whom are his core friends, some of whom are mine. Its usually a ton of fun, and despite the expense, I can’t really say I regret all the nights out, but we’ve both agreed that we need to work harder at prioritizing the nights out, as well as the times we blow significant amounts of money on dinner out together because we are too tired/lazy to think about cooking something.
The situation hasn’t been helped by a rather bizarre confluence of events the last month in a half. My birthday was 2/26, my best friend’s birthday was 3/7, another friend’s birthday was 3/21, BF’s birthday was 3/22, and finally, another good female friend of mine’s birthday was 4/4. It seemed like every time we turned around, there was another excuse for a huge, over the top night out, and you just don’t want to say no when its the people that you care most about. Adding to the dilemma was the fact that BF’s best friend lost his job 3 weeks ago. Now, he is by trade a chef/restaurant manager, and, despite the fact that he and his girlfriend are some of our very favorite people to hang out with, the opportunities for socializing were often few and far between due to his work schedule. So, having him around and available for the last few weeks meant that we got to spend a lot of time with them, and that we also spent a lot of money going out to eat. Luckily, just today he got word that he is starting a new job on Wednesday, so that particular extravagance should be over for a while. We also don’t have another birthday looming for over a month, so I’m hoping that we can really cut back this month and entertain ourselves at home a bit more often.
It’s definitely an ironic turn of events, because when we first met, I was very much the party/go-out girl, and he was the stay at home guy, but we’ve managed to sort of temper each other a bit, and will hopefully come to a better understanding. I’m shooting for a schedule that has us going out maybe twice a week – drinks on Thursday night at Karaoke, and either dinner or drinks/cover some other night of the week with friends. Hopefully, we can have more nights like we did last night, where we went to dinner with B&T (BF’s best friend and his girlfriend) but weren’t terribly hungry and split an entree. We also had drinks at B’s apartment both before and after dinner (we’ve provided our fair share of alcohol and mixers there!) and saved on that cost as well. All in all, we each spent $11, which I certainly can’t complain about.
