Money Saving Tips: Lunch on the Cheap
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Looking for some money saving tips? How about saving $295 per year by packing your lunch? Awesome blogger Clever Dude and his wife, Clever Dudette (a Registered Dietitian) shows the world a lunch menu that’s both enjoyable and easy on the wallet.
Clever Duette Frugal Lunch Idea:
Turkey sandwich on wheat bread with lettuce, tomato, light mayo, carrot sticks, canned pears in light syrup and a snack pack of Oreos (the husband’s favorite):
- Turkey sandwich on wheat bread ($1.30)
- Lettuce ($0.25)
- Tomato ($0.25)
- Light mayo ($0.14)
- Carrot sticks ($0.12)
- Canned pears in light syrup ($0.69)
- Snack pack of Oreos ($0.41)
- Fountain or cooler water (free!)
Cost: $3.16
Comparison with eating out? Let’s assume an average lunch is $6 and that you have the frugal lunch idea twice per week. By packing your own lunch twice per week, you will save annually $295!
What more money saving tips? Check out more frugal lunch ideas from CleverDude.com!
Have your own frugal lunch idea? Sharing is caring 
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10 Comments so far
leave a commentAnother good way to save, and this is only applicable depending on where you work, is to partake in the free soda/juice and miscellaneous “snack food” in the kitchen to add to your lunch. If you just bring your $1.94 turkey sandwich twice a week and grab a snack and drink from the office stash you’ll save ~$423 a year.
I do this on occassion (well, the soda/juice I do pretty much everyday). I also venture out to frozen meals, specifically Trader Joe’s Microwavable Mac ‘n’ Cheese (try it, it’s the BEST frozen mac ‘n’ cheese in the WORLD), which is about $3.50. Trader Joe’s also have a delicious frozen/microwavable chicken sausage calzone for about $2.
Every other week my roommate cooks up a box of pasta and separates it into individual plastic containers (like the re-usable gladware), stashes it in the fridge for the week and adds some tasty salad dressing to in the morning before she leaves for work to make a delicious pasta salad lunch. One box of pasta makes 5 days worth of lunches, I believe. I personally wouldn’t enjoy eating the same exact thing everyday for lunch, but she enjoys it since she’s so particular about food.
Another helpful tip, I know a lot of people who complain about bringing something like a sandwich with mayo or mustard or dressing to work because it soaks into the bread and the lettuce and turns into a mushy slop pile, yet refuse to eat a sandwich without some sort of spread on it. A good way to avoid the “mushy slop pile” is to pack the ingredients (bread, meat & cheese, lettuce & tomatoes, mayo/mustard/etc.) into individual containers like ziplock baggies and then compile your sandwich at work and Ta-Da! a wonderfully fresh sandwich!
Also! Just one more thing, I swear.
LEFTOVERS! Never underestimate the power of leftovers. Especially restaurant leftovers, those can be really fantastic lunches. And if you order in lunch at work, try to see if you can order something that’s large in portion but still inexpensive ($6-$8), save half of it for lunch the next day and you just stretched your lunch budget!
Before I was married, I was eating out to lunch every single day of the week at about 7 to 10 dollars a pop. It wasn’t something I was really even thinking about, until my wife made me add it all up. 50 to 70 dollars a week on lunches alone! These days I brown bag it and I spend about $15 dollars a week on lunches. That’s a huge savings every month. It’s over a 100 bucks!
I think the number one way to save money fast and easy is to bring your lunch to work everyday. Try to start out with just doing it two times a week and once you see the savings you are pocketing then you will most likely do it everyday.
Sharing: Another way to save is not buy individual snack packages. Just buy bags and boxes of snacks. On Sunday bag them up individually and put them in a “snack box.” I created this for my son and my husband and I use it now. We just each grab one or two snacks out of the snack box and throw them in with our lunch. Also, buy soda, juice, and water in big bottles and pour them into a thermas or other reusuable drink container. It’s so much cheaper then buying juices and soda cans.
When I cook, I cook with next day’s lunch in mind. With the kids away from home now there’s just two of us at home, but most of our favorite recipes make four or more servings. The extra servings go into plastic containers and into the freezer. I just pop one into a lunch box later.
I also put canned or frozen fruit (store bought or home-canned or frozen) into small reusable plastic containers and put them in the refrigerator so they’re ready to drop in the lunch box in the morning.
I like yogurt with my lunch, so my next plan is to learn how to make my own yogurt — in its own little containers, ready to go.
I think the concept of a low-cost meal as you suggest above is wonderful, but in practice, it never works out as you suggest.
Why?
Well, because there is no such thing as as a .25 tomato or wheat bread for $1.30. What I would like to see is someone layout a $50 grocery bill where you use up 100% of the products (the total outlay) within the list. In other words, the tomato was .25 for one meal, so how do you use the other .75 of it and within the time frame before it rots.
http://www.leveragingideas.com
@ Squasher98 – Wheat Bread for $1.30? I get it for $.99 a loaf! And no need to live in a rural area and shop at the $.99 store to get it for $.99. I live in Los Angeles and shop at Trader Joe’s.
Squasher98 – Check out this site: http://hillbillyhousewife.com
She has a few sample budgets complete with recipes starting at $40 a WEEK for a four person family. Some of the food sounds good, too. I’m going to try to adopt a few of the recipes to cut costs! I’d be happy with $80 a week for two people.
I really like the idea in this blog though — making a small change, like bringing your own lunch twice a week, is achievable for people currently eating out every day and has real results.
Here’s a great healthy lunch that packs well for work:
Buy one bunch of Kale ($2-4), a pack of firm tofu ($3-5) and brown rice (
I love this blog! Great advice.
My wife and I have started to use blogs like yours to teach our children about saving money. It is important.
We started doing this when we read http://www.StickyAsset.com. It gave us a lot of ideas – including….spending one hour a day on the internet looking for savings ideas.
Thank you for your help.
Hemby
Thanks this is a great idea, I just went through and checked too see how much I am spending on lunch and it is a lot. It never seems like much but after a while it starts to add up. I think that I should be able to cut down the amount I spend by at least 60% by making my own lunches. What I plan to do is to make food in bulk, then freeze it, then at lunch time I can just pop it in the microwave.