Photo by Zeetz Jones

When you start a new budget you pay attention to every single dime you spend. It can be a big wake up call for anyone that is use to care free spending. You start getting creative and you find ways to cut back on things you really don’t need. That’s exactly what happened on my recent date night with my wife.

The Sushi
A sushi dinner is usually expensive, but it doesn’t have to be. You can go to a high end flashy restaurant and order the premium rolls plus bubbles or wine and end up spending well over $100 for two people. With sushi, there are plenty of neighborhood restaurants that bring in high quality fresh fish and serve it at decent prices.

I personally don’t want to spend more than $5 for a sushi roll (6 pieces). Those $12 and $20 4 piece specialty rolls just don’t do it for me. We ordered edamame, 4 sushi rolls and 1 nigiri. No alcohol, which always cuts a ton off the bill.

Normally we would have ordered more food because I like to try everything. This time I had a late lunch and by the time we got to dinner I was just a little hungry. Eating a late lunch before you go to a dinner like sushi will save you money because it’s so easy to over order when you have all those small dishes to choose from. Our entire bill was $36.

The Movie
Then we headed off to see Avatar, which I really liked. I have never seen a movie in 3-D before. We used our coupon book to buy our tickets, and we bought them at the theater before we went to dinner to make sure it wouldn’t be sold out. There’s nothing like waiting in a long line to get the worst seats or find out there are’nt any seats left.

So that’s how we did sushi and a movie for under $60. We planned ahead, ate a late lunch on accident, ordered less sushi, no alcohol and used coupons to buy our movie tickets. And even though we were trying to save money, we still had a lot of fun.