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

Buy one bunch of Kale ($2-4), a pack of firm tofu ($3-5) and brown rice (

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.

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

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.

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.

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!