We went to Red Lobster and ordered two meals which we split with the kids.


My husband ordered a half order of the fresh salmon with wild rice and broccoli and a salad. My daughter ate off his plate. (She loves salmon, but she also loved the biscuits they serve before the meal. She is a bread fiend.) His meal was $15.50.

I ordered the Seafood Stuffed Flounder, mashed potatoes and broccoli. My meal came with two flounder fillets, so I gave one to my son; he also shared my broccoli and mashed potatoes. My meal was $13.50.

For the first time since we started this challenge, we didn’t order too much food. We all finished the food and were comfortably satisfied.

The best part about this meal, though, was that it was essentially free. Our food total came to $29.00 + 2.97 tax = 31.97. I left a $6.03 tip since we split meals, our kids can sometimes be messy and we had a friendly server who brought out bread for the kids right away. Our grand total was $38.00. However, we had a Red Lobster gift card that we were able to get through our reward points, so the meal was essentially free in that we paid nothing out of pocket for it. (To see more about using credit card rewards points to get free meals, go to my post here.)

Melissa Batai

Melissa Batai

Melissa, a mom to three little ones (ages 7, 3 and 1), blogs at both Mom’s Plans where she writes about living a fulfilling life on less and paying down debt, and Fiscal Phoenix where she writes about rising from the ashes of your financial mistakes.