Bringing your lunch can add to your savings
By Albert B. Crenshaw
Washington Post
It has long been a throwaway line in financial advice columns like this one that you can save a lot of money by bringing your lunch from home instead of buying it at a local eatery or hamburger stand.
And, like a lot of conventional wisdom, it turns out to be true.
But how much money do you save, and is it worth the time and trouble?
The latter part of that question is highly subjective, but the first part — how much you save — can be calculated fairly accurately. And if you brown-bag religiously, it really is real money.
The Wall Street Journal reported recently that if you packed your lunch every day for 30 years, you'd save $100,000. That figure is based on $6 to buy lunch and $3.50 for brown-bagging it.
That calculation evidently assumes that you not only save the money but invest it, but even uncompounded savings would add up to thousands of dollars over the years. And as a longtime brown-bagger, I wondered whether $3.50 for a packed lunch wasn't on the high side.
So I set out to pin down the true cost of a lunch, or at least of mine. It's not exotic — a ham-and-cheese sandwich, a granola bar, an apple and 12 ounces of cranberry juice — and it turned out to cost about $2.
And there are ways to shave the cost ever further.
Most economical of all, I could bring leftovers from home. You'll notice that all the items in the lunch I've described are store-bought — all I do is assemble them. But almost every household has leftovers, and some of them go to waste. So any lunch that consisted of things that have already been paid for and would otherwise be discarded could be viewed as essentially free.
There is also room to save at coffee break. Coffee at the various chains may be good, but as you can see, a morning cup of latté may well cost more than my entire lunch. The answer, of course, is BYO. Quite good Colombian coffee is $7.99 for two pounds at discount, and even allowing for the cost of a good coffee maker and a thermos, it wouldn't take many days to get ahead.
If you want something to drink that costs essentially nothing, try tea. A box of 312 bags of Lipton at discount was $6.99, a little more than 2 cents a bag. If hot water is gratis at work, you can see what the savings would be.
On the other side of the coin, you can see that these prices leave room to bring something much nicer and still come out ahead. Many employers now make microwave ovens and refrigerators available to employees, opening up lots of possibilities for soups, casseroles and other goodies.
Whether it's worth it is up to you. But to get a sense of the money involved, try going to www.dinkytown.net. It's a collection of calculators for all sorts of things, including one for lunch savings. Click on "Savings" among the choices at the left, and then on "Lunch Savings Calculator."
It's a bit of an eye-opener.
