Lunch Money
September 24th, 2008I’ve had a bad habit for awhile now. I’ve been a regular in the crowd that goes out to lunch at local restaurants. In recent past I’ve curbed it a bit on occassion, mostly because I wanted to push my diet a little harder, but this week I have been really thinking about just how much those lunches (and breakfasts) are costing me. It doesn’t seem like much when I hit up a restaurant at lunch time and spend somewhere in the neighborhood of ten to fifteen dollars, and even seems less serious at breakfast which tends to be under five, but when I start to really consider it that’s a lot of money when I start doing this four or even five days a week on a regular basis!
Let’s do the math, shall we? To start with, let’s be really conservative and say that eating breakfast and lunch out is costing me $15 a day, five days a week. Staying to the conservative side, let’s call a month 4 weeks even. This means that any given month that I eat out this often (which has really been all too common) I am spending $15 x 5 x 4 every month, or $300! Even if I’m being good at least a little bit that’s $3000 a year. It’s plausibly as expensive as a smoking habit.
Any reasonable person can take note of this and simply decide to not go out to eat and put that money into savings, or paying down debt or even just leave it in that checking account and leave it alone, but I have to admit that my ability to be reasonable when it comes to finances is just not what I’d like it to be.
My co-worker, who also has decided to stamp out his lunch habit has gone the route of having the money he would have been spending automatically pushed to a savings account that isn’t immediately accessible, making it impossible for him to just go on out to lunch without a great deal of hassle. While this seems entirely logical, I find the method a little drastic and honestly somewhat scary to me, having hit the wall with my finances in the past and had those little hassles bite me in the overdraft. Beyond that, it’s still really a matter of willpower for me as I can quite happily go spend the money and move it anyway.
So I decided to make a bit of a game out of this. Instead of saving my money on the front end, expecting to not go out and eat, I save my money when I manage to muster up the willpower not to go out and eat. The workings of my system are simple. If I go out to eat, I lose. I failed. Bad dog. If I skip going out for breakfast, I earn $5, and if I skip going out for lunch I earh $10. Sometime in the afternoon, when I’ve a short break, I figure out how much I earned for the day and transfer it straight on over to my savings account. What really makes this system better for me is that I have potential reward for the challenge every day. The reward that I get for a given day overshadows my desire to go out to eat, and that has helped immensely in keeping on track.
Another part of this that is important for me is that I can still go out for the social interaction. Just because I went ahead and packed a sandwich to munch down at my desk doesn’t mean I can’t hop in the car with my buddies who are going to whatever restaurant and chat with them about whatever topics come up just like usual. The only difference is that I don’t have a plate of food in front of me, and in general I’m drinking water instead of some overpriced soda, tea or juice, which is better for me anyway.
Following this plan I hope to win in so many ways. I get to keep my at-work social life, I get to bolster my savings account and I get to better control what I eat to help push me closer toward my fitness goals. This also opens me up for some options to go ahead and skip out on going with my friends on some days and spend that time doing a little exercise.