Entertainment Book

I love the Entertainment Book. Since discovering it a few years ago, I'm an avid user. When I first started using it, I felt funny about it but now I take it as a challenge to use it as many times as possible. Two years ago, our CTO gave everyone at our company a copy (small company of 60 employees). One gal actually created a spreadsheet of all the restaurants within 5 miles of the office. There were several times that 6 of us went to a place and used 3 cards together. We live in Tustin and I work in Costa Mesa so there are plenty of restaurants just in those two cities not to mention all the other nearby cities. Several restaurants are within 2 miles of our house. To take advantage of all our favorite restaurants that we would go to anyway several times over the course of a year, I actually have 4 copies of the book. Last year, we used the card a total of about 40 times. Many of the restaurants are quite nice with entrees in the $20-$35 range. Not only has using the card gotten us out to places we wouldn't have known about or tried, but it saves us on average of probably $80 a month on dining out, movie tickets and even Ralphs supermarket coupons. We probably eat out for dinner twice a week and rarely go to restaurants that aren't available on the card. I almost feel cheated paying for 2 full meals but of course there are many good restaurants that aren't on the card. I think it's rather ironic that we have money and income so that we don't need to use the card but like to use it anyway. But people with 1/2 our income think it's tacky and could never "lower" themselves to use a discount card. It's not that we're cheap but rather just think it's foolish to pay list price when you can often pay 1/2 price. Ok, I am a little cheap but I'm getting better. Let the schmuck behind me pay full price.

Total spent yesterday:
$4 Starbucks
$81 Target (misc t-shirts, clothes)
$32 Vons supermarket (saved $24 dollars with double coupons)
$37 gasoline (I drive my car until the tank is virtually empty)

Total spent today:
$8 lunch at Greek cafe
$52 MicroCenter (Business Plan Maker software, want to get out of the corporate rat race)
$4 Green Burrito (2 burritos, buy 1 get 1 free coupon)