We save a ton of money by packing our lunches. Both my honey and our daughter take their lunches to work/school everyday. I don’t pack a lunch because I don’t seem to go anywhere when I don’t have a car, so I just eat at home. How much do we save?
That’s kinda where it gets a bit tricky. There are so many factors to consider, like what’s in each lunch, whether the items purchased on sale, with a coupon and such. So I’ll try to use an average of their daily lunches.
We might pay for groceries to make the lunches, but the cost of those are way less than we would pay for lunches. It probably costs us about 50 cents for our kiddo’s lunch per day & about $1.00 for my husband’s lunch per day.
School lunch w/ a milk is $2.05
Honey’s lunch @ work ranges $7 to $18
*Assumptions– school lunches 20 days per month x 9 months in school year (180 days)*
School lunches = $369.00 per year
Packed lunches = $90.00 per year
*Assumptions– lunch @ work 20 days per month x 12 months (240 days)*
Lowest @ work ($7.00) = $1,680.00 per year
Mid-price @ work ($12.50) = $3,000.00 per year
Highest @ work ($18.00) = $4,320.00 per year
Packed lunches = $240.00
I would totally freak out if my husband spent that much money eating lunch out every day. That is just so crazy! Can people really afford that? Anyways, just using the lowest possible price for my honey to buy lunches at work and a school lunch, that would be $2,049.00 per year. WOW!
I’m not even going to add up the more expensive lunches, that’s just nuts. It would cost about $330.00 per year if they brought lunches from home, which at the least saves us $1,719.00 every year. After the past few years of getting into our finances, there’s no way we’d allow anything like that to happen.
Sometimes my mom buys a few school lunches for our daughter and I’m not going to stop her. Our kiddo thinks it’s fun to have school lunches every once in a while, but understands that when we bring our own lunch we save lots of money and get to pick out our own stuff. I’ve been filling her head with this for almost 3 years now and it’s working so far. That’s not brainwashing is it? Well, it works—guess I shouldn’t question a good thing.
Anybody else save money by packing lunches?
Hi Jen! My boyfriend and I would love to pack lunches and eat in more often to save money. However, the last time we calculated how much our cooked-at-home meals cost, they were more than we thought we were paying per meal by cooking with our own groceries! Do you have some good examples of affordable meals you put together?
@Britta- Hi to you!
The cost of packing your own lunches as well as cooking at home can sometimes be more than dining out. There are just so many factors that affect grocery spending, such as: special diets, being picky (that’s me), buying only organic foods, eating meat daily, how extravagant and complex the meals are and so forth.
I’ve been thinking lately about throwing together a little something about how to save money on groceries and such. Let me know if you think something like that would be helpful.
As for lunches though, we usually start with a sandwich and then add in some snacks to go with it. Like a string cheese, apple slices, almonds or nuts, granola bars, banana, some carrots, maybe a small salad—you know stuff like that. Sorry I’m not much help just yet, but I plan to do better with the whole “meal thing” little by little.