lunches

What do you spend to buy lunch each day at work, or even for your kids at school? Packing and carrying a lunch is much cheaper than buying it each day, not to mention, much healthier than most alternatives.

My kids school serves fairly healthy meals, but they are $2 a day, which includes milk, or they can get milk to go with their packed lunch for $.25 a day. As long as I don’t buy lots of prepackaged single serving foods to go in their lunch, I spend way less than that to send them their lunches each day. I often will buy a full sized box of graham crackers and then divide it up into serving sizes (usually 2 crackers, broken in half, so 4 halves) and put them in sandwich bags. I send baby carrots, hot soups, macaroni and cheese, sandwiches, fruit, yogurt, salads (yes, I have a child who requests salad in her lunch) with Cubies (about $3.50 a box at Walmart) or a soup thermos I can send hot or cold meals and have them last until meal time.

The same thing goes for my husband for his lunches, his options for lunch are fast food picked up on the way in, a packed lunch from home, or junk food from the company store, they are not allowed to leave the site for lunch, so here, packing lunches becomes even more important, and gives us more opportunity to save money. My husband likes to take stews to work, he really likes the Campbell’s Chunky stews, which around here, run about $4 each if you get them in the microwavable bowl, or $3.50 in the can, which adds up really quickly. However, last week I made a stew, and put it in serving size bowls, and froze it. We did the math, that stew ended up costing about $2 a bowl. HUGE savings and it really adds up fast.

Those left overs in the fridge.. Can you heat them up and send them? My oldest daughter loves me to send left over spaghetti in her lunch, she says it is a real treat to open up the thermos and find spaghetti. And for my husband, I don’t even heat it up, he has access to a microwave, so I just pull it out of the fridge, make sure it is in a good container (and not too much) and send it.

If you generally drink sodas or juice at work / school, buying in large packaging and taking from home is much much cheaper than a vending machine, especially if you can buy on sale too. Think about it, $1 a can for a soda in a machine or $3 a 12 pack on sale, or even $5 not on sale is still cheaper, juice even more so because of the value.

Plus, if you are buying larger containers, and using reusable containers, it is less waste and better for the environment too.