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I’ve been bad. I’ve been eating out for lunch too many times. I keep making excuses to eat out. It’s not good for my wallet and it’s not good for my health. I’m eating Whopper Jr. value meals, Bojangles, and Mexican food. Argh, I got to get serious again.
I realize that I need to get back to my ‘cash’ lunch routine. I’ve been using my check card instead of stopping by my bank’s ATM and getting my ‘allowance’. Paying cash made it seem more real.
I’m not going to eat out the rest of this week. On Saturday, I’ll pick up my weekly cash. I need to get focused. How have you kept on your eating out budget? Any advice?
Photo Credit: ebruli
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When I regularly ate out for lunch, it was because I didn’t have time to pack a good lunch (at least, that’s what I told myself). Maybe in the coming week, you can come up with some fun lunches from home that will keep you on track and not tempted by Burger King.
Kacies last blog post..What we did right (and wrong) on vacation
Thanks Kacie! I’m going to pick up some stuff this weekend and make my lunch ahead of time. Just have to pick what I want…..
Well, I just budget myself for $7/day for lunch/self-spending. Anything I don’t use or have left over for the day, I put into my savings acct. I once even transfered .04 cents back into my savings…a bit funny, but ultimately I was still sticking to my plan.
Packing lunch and healthy snacks (and maybe breakfast too, depending on what time you start work) makes a
huge difference. I always join in on team lunches and things (which the company picks up), but can’t remember a time in years that I spent money on lunch at work.
frugal zeitgeists last blog post..Scraping by in the city
[...] admitted the other day that I was eating out for lunch too much. I decided to stop that trend. I talked with a coworker that I needed to cut down on it and we both [...]
Thanks to James Schaefer for the insightful comments, with kind attribution to the Journal’s Jonathan Clements and to Jim’s own brother, about the intriguing and powerful concept of “opportunity cost”. James’ letter appeared in Letters on October 23.
When we spend money on things we don’t need, not only do we lose that money, but we permanently deprive ourselves of what that money, better applied, could have yielded. $1 million (and maybe much, much more) is not lost by your carelessly misplacing it. It is lost $50 and $100 at a time. When you buy $10 glasses of beer, $15 glasses of wine, $50 lunches, $100 dinners, $125 ties and $500 shoes, you lose out on the future value those funds, if invested even in a poorly performing market, would have produced. Over a lifetime, the poorly performing markets will fade into nothingness and the long term results take effect. Indeed, the financial crises of the hour will one day be but a memory. The shock of realizing what you could have had will floor you and last a lifetime.
$1,000 per month invested at 8% for 35 years amounts to almost $2.3 million. Adjusting for 3% inflation, you would still have over $800,000 in today’s dollars. Take a look at your annual expenditures on things you don’t need and you’ll find the $1,000 (and maybe a lot more) a month.
Ignorance of the concept of opportunity cost can mean, after 35 years of well paid employment, having a negligible net worth at 60 and parking cars under the direction of a high school kid at 70. You can be young in this country and be without money but it’s really tough being old and in that shape and much worse to realize it needn’t have turned out that way. James’ brother advised saving “until it hurts.” What did he know that you don’t?
Richard E. Savoy
[...] We’re trying to build a bigger buffer for our emergency fund into our joint savings account. Grabbing whatever is quick and easy has been a weakness of mine. I did spend more eating out, but once I planned a bit more, the lunch [...]
[...] Grabbing whatever is quick and easy has been a weakness of mine. I’m going to cut down on my take out lunches to 3x week for the next 2 weeks and then drop down to eating out once or twice a week for the rest of the year. It helps if I remember that the money I’m saving is going towards a goal, so the money saved will go towards the joint savings account. [...]