Take a bite out of your lunch budget
You might have missed this story that ran yesterday in the Sentinel. The bottom line is that you could be save around $1000 a year if you pack your lunch instead of buying it. Despite that, we continue to skip the pb & j and go out to eat instead.
Here is the full story:
Packing lunch instead of eating out might be considered too obvious for anti-recession advice.
But market research shows Americans still aren't packing as much as they could. Brown-bagging has risen in recent years, but it's still below levels of the late 1990s, when the economy was booming.
"For six or seven years now, we've been watching an increase in brown-bagging," said Harry Balzer, a vice president at the NPD Group, which tracks consumer trends. "We certainly expected that these economic times would increase brown-bagging" even more.
But they haven't--so far. The portion of "carried meals" per American stayed the same as 2008 progressed, even as the economy worsened, NPD surveys showed.
Bringing a lunch every weekday can conservatively save $1,000 a year, if you figure you can make lunch for less than $2 and have to spend $6 at a cafeteria or fast-food place. Load up on what NPD says is the most popular daily brown-bag item after fruit and chips--the humble peanut butter-and-jelly sandwich--and you can do even better.
Hate making lunch every day? Start a "lunch pool," as Karen Hoxmeier of mybargainbuddy.com recommended to The Hartford Courant.
Have three or five work colleagues take turns making lunch for each other.
"A sandwich made by somebody else always tastes better," Hoxmeier told The Courant. "With any luck, there'll be one person who wants to outdo the other, and you end up with great lunches."