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Brown Bagging Your Way to Savings

Today’s post is written by Mike Collins of http://savingmoneytoday.net as part of the Yakezie Blog Swap in which bloggers were asked to share their best day to day money saving tip.

Do you buy lunch at work every day? Have you ever actually sat down and added up how much money you’re spending?

I did once…and I almost fell out of my chair when I saw how much I was spending!

Back in the day I used to buy lunch at the office almost every single day. It certainly didn’t seem like I was spending much. A chef salad here, a cheese steak and fries there. But every day I was spending about 7 dollars and change. That’s $35 a week, which adds up to a whopping $1820 over the course of a year!

I started thinking about all the things I could do with that extra $1820, like paying off some of our debt, increasing my 401k contributions(ed: but staying with your 401k contribution limits, of course!), picking out a new big-screen tv, or enjoying an extended family vacation at Walley World.

I immediately starting bringing my lunch to work 4 days a week (I do treat myself once a week) and I’ve been saving money ever since.

Now I know what you’re thinking. It costs money to bring lunch from home too right?

Yes, of course it does…but nowhere near as much as eating out every day. Let’s do some basic math to prove the point. Say you swing by the grocery store to buy some ham and cheese so you can make sandwiches for the week. You pick up a half pound of ham for $3 and a half pound of cheese for $2. A loaf of bread on sale runs you another $2. That means you just spent $7 for a week’s worth of lunches. Even if you only bring lunch 4 days a week you’ve still saved yourself $21. That’s over $1000 a year!

And here’s a tip to save even more: If you have extra food from dinner, just bring the leftovers for lunch the next day. We always try to make just a little bit extra so I can have free lunch the next day.

So the next time you’re sitting around complaining that you don’t have enough money for so and so, think about how much money you are spending every day on lunch, or coffee, or cigarettes, etc. You might just find that you have plenty of money after all if you just shift your priorities a bit.

Sunday Roundup: Reddit Rocks

Misc

Friday was my biggest traffic day, ever. Mike‘s guest post, Brown Bagging Your Way to Savings, went slightly nuts on reddit. For a few hours, it was in the top 10 on the front page, generating more traffic every half hour than I normally see in a day. That was fun.

In other news, my kid is in the #2 slot for wrestling the heavyweight slot on his wrestling team.

30 Day Project Update

This month, I am trying to establish the Slow Carb Diet as a habit. At the end of the month, I’ll see what the results were and decide if it’s worth continuing. For those who don’t know, the Slow Carb Diet involves cutting out potatoes, rice, flour, sugar, and dairy in all their forms. My meals consist of 40% proteins, 30% vegetables, and 30% legumes(beans or lentils). There is no calorie counting, just some specific rules, accompanied by a timed supplement regimen and some timed exercises to manipulate my metabolism. The supplements are NOT effedrin-based diet pills, or, in fact, uppers of any kind. There is also a weekly cheat day, to cut the impulse to cheat and to avoid letting my body go into famine mode.

I’m measuring two metrics, my weight and the total inches of my waist , hips, biceps, and thighs. Between the two, I should have an accurate assessment of my progress.

Weight: I have lost 25 pounds since January 2nd. That’s 3 pounds since last week. 17 more to meet my goal for February.

Total Inches: I have lost 14 inches in the same time frame, down 2.5 since last week.

Best Posts

J. Money has launched an awesome new project called Love Drop. Once a month, they go make a huge difference in someone’s life. Wise Bread interviewed them yesterday.

Tip: Use the word “solved” in a google search to find the answers to tech problems.

If OMG and Awesome got drunk and made a baby with Optimus Prime, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Cobra Commander’s nastiest fantasies, the offspring wouldn’t be this good. Holy crap. Major cheese alert.

Q. Why do some business lobby hard for excessive regulation in the name of protecting the environment or forcing people into decisions they disagree with, only to turn around and lobby for waivers to those regulations once they are passed? A. Because it’s not about the environment or health or giving-a-crap. It’s about the money. When an established company pushes for regulations, it’s to keep upstarts from entering the market. Regulations add barriers to entry. Anybody who’s trying to force you to do something for your own good has a product to sell to meet that “need”.

LRN Timewarp

This is where I review the posts I wrote a year ago. Did you miss them then?

Have you ever given any thought to the idea that debt is a social disease? It’s taboo, you usually didn’t do anything nice to get it, and it’s hard to get rid of.

In case I haven’t made it obnoxiously clear, I’m more than a bit of a geek. The post I wrote about D&D and personal finance should make it more obvious.

Carnivals I’ve Rocked and Guest Posts I’ve Rolled

Medical Costs and Choices was included in the Festival of Frugality.

How to Save Money On Anything was included in the Carnival of Personal Finance.

Mike from http://savingmoneytoday.net presented Brown Bagging Your Way to Savings, which is the post that went kinda nuts on reddit. He also hosted my post, Resisting Temptation.

Thank you! If I missed anyone, please let me know.

Get More Out of Live Real, Now

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You can send me an email, telling me what you liked, what you didn’t like, or what you’d like to see more(or less) of. I promise to reply to any email that isn’t purely spam.

Have a great weekend!

5 Steps to Save

Finance

: Image by BitHead via Flickr

“Saving is too hard.”

“I don’t know where to start.”

“How much should I save?”

“Who the heck are you to tell me what to do with my money?”

“Shut up, Jason.”

These are the things I hear when I start talking about getting a good strategy in place to save some money. Financial matters are intimidating to a lot of people. They’d rather not think about their money any more than they absolutely need to, if that much. Here, I’m breaking it down to some simple steps to make saving easy.

1. Get motivated. Why do you want to save some money? Are you trying to make a secure future, or do you just want to buy a new toy? These are the kind of questions you have to ask yourself. Nobody else can tell you why you want to make changes to your lifestyle, and nobody else’s reasons matter in the least. Saving money is something you have to do for you.

2. Figure out how much you can save. Generally, you’re going to need a budget so you can figure out what you can afford to save, but not always. If you are making ends meet, then you get a raise, you can obviously afford to bank the difference. If you do that, you’ll never even notice the missing money. If you try to save so much your mortgage goes unpaid, you’re plan is doomed to failure.

3. Open an account at a new bank. The biggest problem I used to have when I was trying to save was that it was too easy to get the money. Every time I checked the balance of my checking account, I saw the balance in the savings account. Worse, it took seconds to transfer that money from my savings account to my attached checking account. Every time I wanted to see if I could afford whatever toy I was looking at, I’d see money that wasn’t earmarked for anything in particular. Naturally, that money got spent more often that it was ignored and allowed to grow. Now, I can completely forget about the money.

4. Automate. I’ve automated everything I can. All of my bills are paid automatically, except for one company that insists on quarterly paper invoices. I’ve got $665(neighbor of the beast!) automatically transferred to my INGDirect account, to get divided between my various savings goals, including a fund for my semi-annual property tax payments and a fund to pay for the braces we haven’t actually had to buy yet, but will in a couple of years. The money disappears into a bank I don’t use for my day-to-day expenses and grows completely out of sight. Every once in a while, I look at the account and get surprised by how much has accumulated.

5. Get rich. Once you’ve got the other four steps in place, all you’ve got to do is let it work. Over time, you will build wealth in a way that may surprise you. Your goal at this point is to do nothing new. Every once in a while, you can pull out some money and tuck it into an investment account to get some real growth going for you.

“Thank you.”

“You’re the best.”

“What would I do without you?”

“How can I show you my appreciation? <wink><wink>”

“What the heck are you doing with my wife?”

These are the things I always hope to hear after sharing my strategies to save money.

Sunday Roundup: Outta Town

Misc

Scrapbooking Cupcakes! — Image by clevercupcakes via Flickr

This weekend, my wife is off scrapbooking with my mother and sister-in-law. Instead of hanging around the house trying to keep three kids entertained, I’m at my brother’s house, since his wife abandoned him with their kids, too. I’ll let his kids keep mine entertained, and vice versa. Woo!