Thanks... I'm still trying to wrap my head around what its going to take to make it through the IFR rating.
To expand on MAKG's "yes," it is fairly common for pilots to combine the some of the 50 hour cross country PIC requirement with their dual IFR training flights.
Whether that works or not for you depends on a couple of things.
First, the 50 hour cross country experience requirement is just that, an
experience requirement. It gets you away from the home drome to new places with new traffic patterns, new terrain and, potentially, weather changes. Independent of it being countable toward advanced certificates and ratings, a flight you are solely responsible for to an airport >50 NM away you have never been to before, really does help to increase pilot experience, skill, competence, and confidence. You lose much of that benefit on a dual flight.
If your goal is the airlines, that may not matter to you, since it's sometimes about accumulating certificates and ratings in the shortest period of time. But if your goal is to be a competent , proficient and safe Part 91 pilot, I think it should.
Second, it might really not be a time and cost saver. I'm actually one of those who decries the lack of significant attention given to IFR cross country training (beyond a single required dual flight), so I think some combined time is appropriate. But, for better or worse, IFR training tends to be fairly local, concentrating on approaches. Makes some sense given the overall time requirements because only about 20% of the IR is about flying the airplane; the rest of it it about procedures. And the primary focus of procedures is the ones where you can hit terrain and obstructions - approaches.
Depending on where you are, it's often possible to get a multitude of different approaches very close to each other. Why spend and hour on <ho hum> en route straight and level flight when you can easily accomplish 3-5 different instrument approaches in the same time period?
BTW, that goes for flights under the hood with a safety pilot. Most of us have needed more than the minimum 15 hours of dual, so how much it actually saves depends. You can increase the quality of those safety pilot hours by using them as a form of IFR student "solo" - practicing what you have been taught, preferably coordinating the practice sessions with your instructor who will have a good idea of your strengths and weaknesses and what procedures practice will "make perfect" as opposed to simply ingraining bad habits.