Working moms and dads beware! 

When you’re working the number one money pit fall is actually eating lunch “out.”
Wanting to get out of the office coupled with not having the time to pack a lunch in the morning means lots of trips to fast food or sit down restaurants on your lunch hours which not only costs you valuable cash you could be saving for future college funds but also contributes to a steady increase in your waistline as well!

Let’s take one of the largest months at 4 weeks/31 days and do a little cost analysis.
I’m going to use numbers from my personal experience, cost of living in the Midwest USA compared to cost of living in your area may differ.

The cost of eating out several times a week for one month:
4 weeks of eating lunch out a minimum of 3 times a week for each parent (est. at 8$ a visit) = $192 a month.
2 dinners out per week for a family of 4 adds up to around $320 a month. (est. 40$ a meal)
Total cost of eating out per month = $512 . . . . and this food bill doesn’t even include all the meals you ate at home.

The cost of eating every meal at home for one month:
Weekly grocery bill x 4 weeks (we spend around 120$ a week for the four of us) = 480$
Divide by the number of meals one person eats in one month (3 meals a day x 31 days) = 93 meals. 480$ divided by 93 meals = $5.16 per meal
Divide by the number of people in your family (4) and that comes to around $1.29 per family member per meal. WOW!

Food bill replacing some at home meals with the above restaurant meals = 919$ a month
Food bill eating at home only for one month = $479.88

Savings: 439$

By eating out you are almost doubling your food bill for the month!
Obviously you might want to go out once in a while but in these fast paced times it’s easy to lose track and revert to dinners out several times a week with no idea how it’s impacting your check book. It really gets crazy if your kids are older and you want to also see your savings in packing their lunch instead of “buying” from the school!

Play with your own numbers and see what you come up with! If you need help, just leave a comment.

In future posts I will talk about fast and creative ways to pack your lunch and your kids lunches! In fact if you go into my BENTO tagged entries you can see a few exampes right now! Such as: Leo’s First Lunchbox or Peanutbutter Yum! or Toddler Lunches