There are plenty of ways to save money when eating at work, and today I’m going to mention my 5 top ways to do so!
5 Ways To Save Money When Eating At Work:
- Pack your lunch! This is the best way to save money on lunch, but you must be thoughtful. If you drive to the store every few days to buy the food ingredients to prepare your lunch, you are adding to the cost of lunch because of the extra gas expense! So ideally, you would go perhaps once a month to go shopping for the food ingredients. Buying in bulk helps too!
- When going to a drive-thru, only buy from the value menu! A great disappointment of mine is that one of my favorite McDonald’s breakfast sandwiches, the Sausage Egg McMuffin, is not on the value menu! So to buy one of those, it costs $2.89 at my local McDonalds. The dollar menu Sausage McMuffin sandwich (which is the same but without the egg) only cost $1.00! So that one egg on the Sausage Egg McMuffin sandwich costs more than an entire cartoon of eggs, so do I still buy the Sausage Egg McMuffin? No, I don’t think so!!! I’ll take the Sausage McMuffin please!!!
- For fancier restaurants, consider soup, or soup and salads instead of the regular meal. I’m often surprised to find that the soups are much cheaper than the other entrees on the menu. And some soup options are down right delicious! I’ve had my fill of surprises lately at restaurants like Rocke’s, where their soups are superb!
- Keep a cheap meal in your desk drawer! At work, I typically keep a meal hidden away in my desk drawer. I like the instant oatmeal (brown sugar is my favorite) packets, and I also keep about 10 ramen noodle packets in my drawer too. Both are very tasty if they are only eaten once in a while!
- If you absolutely have to go out from lunch with a group of friends from work (networking and all), don’t spend a lot of money. Try drinking a few glasses of water before you go out to lunch. There is a good chance you won’t be near as hungry after drinking at least two full glasses.
I use all of these techniques when eating both breakfast and lunch on work days! My only vice is the McDonald’s lattes, that I have 4 days a week, but at least it’s covered by the dividends that my lunch experiment stocks yield.
Did I miss any other ways to save money at lunch?
-MR