Buy Lunches at the Store

If you work outside the home or are otherwise away from home on a regular basis during lunch time, you must find ways to feed your hungry belly around noon. The common expectation is that you will end up eating lunch at one of several fast-food establishments available in your vicinity.

That practice, while convenient and tasty, carries a high price with it. We've all seen the news reports telling us how unhealthy fast food is for us and anything that contributes to poor health is likely to hurt you in the pocketbook sooner or later. More immediately obvious though, is that eating at burger-bell on a regular basis takes a chunk out of your personal finances before you even leave the counter or drive-through window.

For some, there may be few realistic alternatives. But most are simply not availing themselves of other options at their disposal. Most employers provide at least a simple dining area, kitchen or cafeteria. This at least opens the door for the traditional "brown-bag" approach to lunches. Many such dining facilities provide workers with access to microwave ovens and maybe even refrigerators.

Regardless of the details, these options allow you the choice of bringing your lunch with you so you can avoid that daily trip to chik-n-hut. But if you don't plan ahead, you will not be able to make the most of this money-saving alternative. That means you need to think ahead about your lunch needs for the next few days, or better still, the next two weeks. Left-overs from dinner the night before make for a great low-cost lunch the day after.

There are also plenty of food products available at many local retailers geared toward providing you with a convenient alternative to fast-food lunches. These products often cost more than truly made-from-scratch lunch items and are typically less healthy, but they still offer considerable advantages in both areas over those burger-joint menus. Many cost between two and thee dollars compared to the five to six dollar range of many fast-food "value meals." Add a drink for maybe a dollar to make the meals closer to equal and you can see an average savings of two to three dollars per lunch. On top of that, many people don't consider that many states look at those two meal options very differently when it comes to taxes.

Many states consider fast food a taxable purchase and the state sales tax is applied. Food bought at the store, however, is often exempt from state taxes. That means you not only save on the purchase price of your store-bought lunch, but save even more by not having to pay the extra tax you would have been charged at the snack-shack. Based on 2007 figures, the national average for state sales tax is 4.75%. So the savings on your noon-time meal increase from say, $2.00 to something closer to $2.25 per lunch.

And don't forget about the gas spent driving to those lunch destinations if you don't bring your own lunch from home. If you drive just a half-mile to your favorite greasy spoon, that's a one mile round trip. Assuming you get something in the neighborhood of 25 miles per gallon and gas is roughly $3.00 a gallon, that round trip eats up another $.12 per day. Buying your lunches ahead of time at the store when you are already there shopping for meals avoids that cost too (or at least minimizes it if you want to allocate some of the shopping trip's gas cost specifically to your lunch purchases).

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