For God Sake Bring Your Lunch to Work!!!
Today I would like to talk about a great way for people to save a lot of money each year, by doing the easiest thing ever… bringing your lunch to work. So many people overlook how much money can be saved by bringing in a lunch instead of going out to eat every day.
If you have read my guides about how to make money online you will know that I am all about looking at making and saving money as a numbers game. It’s true! Anything involving money is a numbers game. It is a set of numbers you are constantly tweaking to give yourself the advantage of being on the receiving end instead of the giving end.
How does this apply to bringing your lunch? Simple… think about how much you spend on lunch, and misc. expenses like breakfast, coffee and soda per day. Now you may be thinking to yourself, it’s not really that much. I felt the same way when I was buying all my food each day. But once I bought my house, I started running numbers to see all the places where I could be saving money for house payments.
What Do I Spend on Lunch Each Day?
Upon examining what I spent on lunch, it didn’t seem like much in the course of a day, or over a few days, but when I looked at it with a broader perspective and played the numbers game I came to realize just how much I was actually spending on food and drinks.
Now I love my coffee as much as the next person and on a normal day I would stop for coffee on my way to work. Sometimes if I was hungry in the morning I would buy a cereal bar for breakfast. The coffee cost about $1.25 for a medium sized cup, while you could easily spend more by getting the larger size, or a “premium” coffee from a place like Starbucks. The cereal bar cost about $0.75. Ok so $2.00 for breakfast, that doesn’t seem that bad?
For lunch I would usually go out to different places to keep it interesting. I might go to the Gas Station and get two hotdogs for a dollar, along with a bag of chips and a soda, or drive down to McDonalds for a quick drive through lunch. When I got sick of stuff like that I would eat at subway, or chip in to have a pizza delivered, and sometimes I would even get cheap Chinese food for lunch.
No matter where I went I ended up spending about $5.00 – $6.00 on average for lunch after factoring in sales tax. Sometimes I would even run out in the afternoon to pickup a soda if I was tired and needed a pick-me-up or just wanted to run out and get some fresh air.
Now why have I bothered outlining this in such detail? Because I think this is probably not that much different from the routine of a lot of people out there. When I rented, I never really felt the need to look that closely at my money. I figured I didn’t need a lot of extra money in the bank, but I think this is a self defeating philosophy that we as American consumers have been duped into believing.
Grand Totals…
Coming back to the “numbers game” let’s take a look at what I spent on a daily basis over the course of time. So let’s see… $2.00 for breakfast, $6.00 for lunch, and $2.00 for a snack or soda. So that’s roughly $10 a day. Not too bad yet.
So after one week this cost me about $50 dollars, ouch! And one month cost me about $200!!? (not factoring weekends) Holy crap! So one year cost me roughly $2,400 dollars for crappy fast food lunches! See how numbers game works.
Now granted I may not have been consistent in that time frame and I might have found some ways to save a dollar or two here and there, so we’ll knock off $400 dollars. So on average I stood to spend about $2,000 a year on food that I could easily bring from home which would probably end up costing me about $400 or less depending on how I planned those lunches.
So you see I could have been saving anywhere from $2,000 – $2,400 dollars a year on food. This doesn’t even factor in the fuel used to go out and get lunch, or the extra unneeded wear it put on my car. How about running to AC on hot days, and the extra gas that was used, when I could have sat inside the air conditioned building where I work.
Now at this point you are probably thinking, “Hey you said this was about how to save $1,000 dollars a year?” That’s true, I did. That was factoring that someone spent the bare minimum for food and drinks each day for a grand total of $5.00. Which is half what I was spending.
Conclusions…
So you can see how significant the numbers game actually is when it comes to making and saving money. Most any business can be approached this same way but it is especially important for making money online. All the little dollars and cents add up over the course of time and this is money that you can be making, saving or wasting.
I hope my long winded rant helps people evaluate other areas where they could be making or saving a lot of extra money. It applies to more than just bringing your lunch to work. I used this example because this was a large area where I was losing money every month that I could be using to pay off my house.
I have found the biggest key at being successful here is keeping your lunch interesting. It’s way too easy to burn out after eating the same thing day after day. Look up some lunch ideas online and keep it interesting so that lunch is something you look forward to. You can get started with some good lunch ideas by using my search link below:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Work+Lunch+Ideas
EDITOR’S NOTE: If you have any lunch tips or money saving ideas I would definitely be interested to hear them. What are some of the ways that you save money on food and drinks on a daily basis? Please share you comments with any good suggestions you can offer to help others. Thanks!