How much do you spend a year on alcohol?
Good morning! If you’re waking up feeling a bit hungover from a big night out last night – keep reading. Can you tell me how much you spent last night at the bar? Probably not. Can you tell me how much you have spent the last week, month, or year at the bar? Definitely not.
While alcohol and bars can provide a great break from the daily grind, I think it is crazy that almost no one knows how much they spend on this type of entertainment. For most of us twenty somethings, alcohol spending adds up to be one of our top five spending categories for the year; literally thousands of dollars that we neglect to budget and track. How much do you spend at the bar?
- Spend $100 a week - $5,200 a year!!
- Spend $200 a week – $10,400 a year!!
To reduce our spending on alcohol we need to budget and track it like we reccomend for all of your expenses. I generally recommend setting budgets for monthly time periods, but I find it is much easier to budget alcohol with a weekly number. When I first graduated from college I easily spent over $100 a week at the bars. Since I began budgetting and tracking my alcohol spending I’ve been able to reduce it to $50 a week. The $50+ I am saving each week doesn’t sound like much, but over the course of a year I’m saving thousands of dollars (enough to help fund your 401(k) or IRA maybe?).
When I advocate spending less at the bar, I’m not at all trying to say you should go less frequently, or telling you to become a hermit and confine yourself to your lonely apartment; I simply think people just don’t realize how much money they blow at bars throughout the year and this expense is an easy one to reduce if you are looking for cash.
Here are a couple of simple things I do to cut down on my bar expenses – all of which are obvious – but well deserving of a read from time to time.
- Do not buy shots!
- Only drink specials
- Pregame before going out
- Frequent bars with less expensive drinks
- Stop requesting specific liqour brands in your cocktails
- Remember, you don’t need to close the bar down every night
Does anyone have any other good ideas to help cut down on bar expenses without cutting down on your time spent at the bar?
i spend around 8 to 10 thousand a week on alcohol. but i guess its the exception when im actively trying to stock a bar to then again take 20somethings money by overcharging for drinks.