When you think about all the things you spend money on, it’s easy to overlook the relatively small, incidental expenses that you incur, although it all adds up. You may not even think about the bottle of fizzy drink and couple of chocolate bars you purchase every day on your way home from work, but, clearly, over a year this could add up to quite a significant amount of money. If you’ve got money to burn, you can afford not to care, but if you’re saving up for a house or some other major purchase or you want to rid yourself of debt you have to look at ways you save some money.
One way of saving money would be to take your own lunch to work. It might sound simple, but it is surprising how many people cannot be bothered to make their own sandwiches or salad to take with them. When you’re rushing around it’s convenient to make excuses and so you tell yourself you just don’t have the time to make a sandwich in the morning for later on, but how long does it take, really? It probably takes less than five minutes to make a sandwich and although it may not taste quite as good as a store-bought sandwich it will be significantly cheaper!
It’s amazing how much shops and cafés can get away with charging for a basic sandwich or salad. You can buy a whole loaf of bread and some meat and have lots of sandwiches for the price of the one sandwich you get from a supermarket. Yet, every lunch time there are long queues of people all lining up to buy some sandwiches and bottles of fizzy drink. If you make your own lunch to take to work with you, you don’t have to queue up and you can save yourself quite a bit of money.
Plus, you have more control over what you’re actually eating. When you buy a salad or sandwich from a shop you don’t always pay attention to the calories or fat content, even though they can be quite high, because all you care about is the taste. Another problem is that you may not be full afterwards and so end up having to buy a couple of bars of chocolate as well, thus costing you even more money. You might think that you’re not going to save much money by switching to your own home-prepared lunches, but it usually works out significantly cheaper and, after all, every little helps.