What do you do for lunch? I never had the luxury of going out to eat for lunch because I worked at a school. Lunch was rather hasty and usually over work, or with students. Last year I started setting the time aside as a break, so I would only do work if I was helping a student (it made me much more relaxed in the afternoon and generally made my school experience better).
Lunch, though, has to come from somewhere, and it is a place you may be able to find more savings that you can spend elsewhere or put away for later. Packing lunch if you don't already is the first way to slash your lunch budget. I had no other option before. Now that I work primarily from home, the temptation to spend higher on lunch has gone up. I've got a ton of good food options all within walking distance. I try, though, to make my lunch at home and resist the temptation of eating out.
I have found, however, that even when eating at home there are ways that I can make a more filling lunch for less money. I've been experimenting with these strategies since I started my weekly sale experiment. Now, I thought I would share my findings with you.
How to spend less on lunch without eating only peanut butter and jelly
1. Don't buy lunch meat.
Lunch meat is a rather traditional lunch time food, but it's pricey and doesn't go a long way.For example: 9 ounces of prepackaged ham costs about $3.00. That's the cheap stuff (it will cost less if you can buy more at once). This 9 ounce package of ham contains, supposedly, 4.5 servings (at 60 calories per serving, 10 grams of protein). $0.67 per serving. Sounds good? Maybe, if the serving size is enough food. I suspect it isn't for a number of people.
If you want to buy a nicer lunch meat, you can get store brand ham at $5.49 for 8 ounces. Or Fancy Brand Name ham at $10.99 per pound.
Lunch meat is (perhaps surprisingly) expensive. Add $0.32 for a cheese slice and a few cents for bread and mayo, and you're looking at $1.00 per sandwich. Then add on the cost of sides, because if you're me that sandwich isn't going to be enough food to get through a busy afternoon.
This doesn't sound like much, but it adds up over time.
2. Do buy eggs
You can buy a dozen store brand eggs for $1.29. I bought mine on sale for $0.99. If you have space, you can buy 18 eggs for even less. |
| A lovely boiled egg whose photo I did not take because, as we've seen, photos of food are extremely difficult to pull off and I don't do it well. |
How are eggs useful for lunch, though? I boil them, mix them with some mayo, mustard, and maybe a little salt, pepper, or paprika (or all of the above) and make egg salad. I then put egg salad on a favorite bread, preferably my newly discovered homemade bread. I also make fried egg sandwiches (I melt cheese on these).
One egg cost me $0.08. Add a few cents for other things you mix in and bread. However you prepare the egg, an egg sandwich is a lot cheaper than a lunch meat sandwich.
The cost and savings:
Just for the sake of example, let's say I was going to eat an egg salad sandwich with a total cost of about $0.20 cents four days a week (that's two eggs and a few cents for mayo and mustard). I'm not including bread, because that cost is the same for both. After one week, that's $0.80 for sandwich filling. After a month, that's about $3.20 for my sandwich filling, and after a year I've spent $41.60 on sandwich filling.Now let's say I eat the ham sandwich with one serving of ham (unlikely) four days a week at $0.99 cents a day. After one week, I've spent $3.96 on my sandwich filling. After a month, I've spent about $15.84. And after a year, I've spent $205.92
In this hypothetical situation, I save $164.32 on just my lunch over the course of a year. Of course, I wouldn't eat only egg salad sandwiches four days a week all year.
So what else can you do? Read on, although you'll have to do the math on your own because there are a lot of variations for the following options.
3. Do buy yogurt
Buy the big container of store brand plain Greek yogurt. Plain yogurt has been an acquired taste for me, but there are a number of ways you can do it well. |
| I took this one myself! I like blackberries, and I added almonds and honey which I already had on hand. |
A 32 ounce container of store brand Greek yogurt costs $4.99. This is supposed to be 4 servings, but usually ends up being more than that when I eat it. I can get 5-6 servings out of one container because it is so filling. I mix it with some honey and fruit, and that is my whole lunch.
Depending on the fruit I mix in, I would estimate the total cost at about $1.00 for this lunch. It costs about the same as a ham sandwich, then, but I don't have to eat anything else.
4. Do buy oatmeal
I prepare oatmeal similarly to the way I use yogurt, mixing in fruit and honey or brown sugar. 42 ounces of store brand oatmeal costs $2.39. There's 30 servings in that container at about $0.08 each. If you want to make it even a little more filling, mix in some peanut butter. No matter what fruit you add, this is one cheap lunch. If you want it to be even cheaper, buy frozen fruit instead of fresh fruit. |
| No, not taken by me. I could not make oatmeal look so good even if it looks this good person. Delicious, right? |
5. Do buy potatoes
This happened to be a favored strategy of last year's high school seniors, who bought a bag of potatoes, stored them in one of the cabinets, and kept toppings in the fridge. They cooked the potatoes in a microwave. I did this myself in college with sweet potatoes, and now I have a bag of potatoes sitting on the counter for this week's lunches.A 5 pound bag of potatoes is about $3.50. This seems to be 9 potatoes, or $0.39 per potato, on average. Add whatever toppings you choose for a lunch costing still less than a dollar.
Want to stay committed?
Change it up, and get yourself a treat every so often.
This strategy will crash and burn if I don't vary my routine! I almost burst into tears one day when faced with eating something I had eaten almost every day for two weeks. I realized I had been eating the same dinner as well the whole week, and faced with the same food again I just couldn't handle the sameness.
That may sound dramatic. It was dramatic. I do want some variety every so often, though, and I work with that now. It's possible to change things up without spending a lot of money.
I rotate what foods I buy for regular lunches. Once a week or every few weeks I may buy something special, or take myself out for lunch to somewhere inexpensive. I take myself out to get a sub, or a sandwich and a smoothie. I'll eat leftovers from other meals or meals we ate out. My husband can eat the same lunch every day for a year or more, but I get bored. Keep some variety to keep this up.
Have any ideas you've tried out? Send them along! I'm always looking for new meals.
That may sound dramatic. It was dramatic. I do want some variety every so often, though, and I work with that now. It's possible to change things up without spending a lot of money.
I rotate what foods I buy for regular lunches. Once a week or every few weeks I may buy something special, or take myself out for lunch to somewhere inexpensive. I take myself out to get a sub, or a sandwich and a smoothie. I'll eat leftovers from other meals or meals we ate out. My husband can eat the same lunch every day for a year or more, but I get bored. Keep some variety to keep this up.
Have any ideas you've tried out? Send them along! I'm always looking for new meals.
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