Now that summer is here and everyone is hitting the road for vacation and sport tournaments, many of us must feed our family on the go.

Last summer our family took an extended vacation to Colorado and my husband and I sat down before we left and tried to budget for everything.  We knew we were going to have access to a kitchen to cook most of our meals.  I also knew we had to build in some down time for mom, after all this was my vacation too!  We budgeted to eat out at two nice family restaurants per week and a couple of runs for fast food during the lunch hour while we were out site seeing.  I started to do research and came up with some really easy ways to cut our food bill.

• Set a limit. Before we even left the driveway we sat down as a family and shared our budget with the kids.  We explained that in order to do some of the fun things we had to watch our money.  Each child was given a set amount of money they could use when we ate at a fast food restaurant.  We gave our kids a $3.00 limit.  We explained that they could choose anything, but there had to be at least one “main” protein. ( If you can call chicken nuggets protein?!)  This was a great way to help the kids feel like they were in control.  They made some really good choices and much to my amazement they stopped buying soda and even opt to “share” larger items.   Many fast food places have decent $1.00 menus for them to choose from.
• Call and sign up for mailings from the Chamber of Commerce in the city you are visiting.  Even if you are just going for the weekend, the booklets and information they will send you are full of coupons and special deals for travelers.
• Visit KidsEat4Free.com. All you have to do is enter your city and state and they will have a list of local restaurants and the restrictions for kids meals.  I printed out this list before we left on vacation so we could always have it handy.
• Use Restaurant.com.  We knew that we would be eating out at nice restaurants a couple of times with family.  I bought several $25.00 gift certificates at Restaurant.com for $2.00 each.  I knew that even if we didn’t use them on our vacation I would leave them for family to have a nice meal after we left.
• Splurge! We choose one day to visit the Denver Aquarium and eat at the restaurant inside.  We told the kids that this was our one day to splurge and set no restrictions.  Through out the trip they reminded us of how many more days until their “Seafood Feast”.  I didn’t eat seafood.  There is just something wrong with eating fish and watching them swim by at the same time!

We had a great time on vacation and avoided many stressful hours of “money worry” by budgeting and planning ahead.

How do you budget for eating out?  Have any good ideas?