AMagill

I started brown bagging my lunch several years ago, and can reveal that I’ve saved almost $5,000! My calculations follow.

We employ a 9/80 work week, which means that we work nine days out of ten over a two week period. We get every other Friday off. Taking into account a two-week vacation and ten holidays, it means that I work 215 days per year.

I used to buy lunch from a deli every day. On average, I spent about $6.00 for a sandwich and $1.25 for a soft drink, for a total of $7.25 per day. Over a period of five years, that’s 215 days times $7.25 times 5 years, or a whopping $7,793.75. Yikes!

For my own sandwiches made at home, I spend about $10.00 per week on cold cuts for myself (nobody else in my family likes Boar’s Head Cajun Turkey), and about $3.00 for bread. I’ve also switched to water, which is free from the water cooler. This comes to about $2.60 per day. Using the same calculation from above, that’s 215 days times $2.60 times 5 years, or $2,795.00, a savings of $4,996.15.

A savings of nearly $5,000, and I haven’t even factored in the interest. If I do a quick-and-dirty extrapolation over twenty years, assuming a 3% interest rate, that’s over $27,000 for five minutes of my time each morning. Let’s see, 0.08 hours times 215 days times 20 years equals 344 hours. Divide $27,000 by 344 and you get an hourly wage for sandwich preparation of $78.49. That’s well worth my five minutes.

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