Recently, I have really gotten into how much things cost and ways to save money. (I guess graduate school costs will do that to you!) Really, it isn't something new for me, I have always been frugal and enjoyed saving money.
Last week I ran to the grocery to get one item - bread. Boring, I know. We always get the same bread and I never thought about the cost. It rang up as $1.67. As I was driving home I thought, I wonder how much that is per sandwhich. I got home and started number crunching. Now, I have always heard that packing lunch vs. going out for lunch saves you money, but I had no idea and wanted to figure it out.
In our loaf of bread there are 18 slices (not including the ends - yuck - who eats those!). So: 1.67/18 = .093 cents per piece of bread! Of course every sandwich has two pieces of bread, so that's $.18 for the bread.
I continued on trying to figure out how much we spend on each lunch we pack.
We started buying items in bulk. We love healthy fruit snacks, Target has really good off-brand Welch's fruit snacks for around $7 with 50 pouches, which equals $.14 a pack! We also always pack chips, we started buying the pre-packaged baked Lays green pouch, again depending on the sales for the week it's around $7 with 20 packets = $.35 each (in the store for one alone it's $1).
Some items are hard to get a good read on how much (i.e. carrots, celery, peanut butter, jelly, etc.). However, my estimated cost for each lunch came out to $1.50 - $2 MAX per lunch. Going out to a CHEAP lunch usually runs you about $6-7 dollars. Per month packing lunch then saves you: $90 a month, and $1080 a year, and if there's two of you that's about $2160 a year - just from packing lunch!
I don't know about you... but I sure can think of about a 100+ ways I could spend $2000 a year!
Just some thoughts to get help others start saving money.
What are tips and ways you have to save?
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