Cold Lunch
Our family has recently converted from being a Hot Lunch Family, to a Cold Lunch Family. With the economy in the dumps right now, we have started to find ways to save some money. My bright idea was to start sending the kids off to school with cold lunch. For our two kids in elementary school, we were spending $1.95 per lunch. For middle school the price is $2.20 and for High School, we fork over $2.45 per lunch. If you add all of these lunches up, we were spending $8.55 per day for lunch. Multiply that by 5 days a week and you hit $42.75. Take that number by 4 and we were spending $171.00 per month for lunch.
I must mention that my wife was already onto this money saving idea before I was. Each of the kids picked days that they wanted hot lunch and the rest were cold lunch. So, the shock wasn’t quite as dramatic as it may seem. I was, however, expecting some backlash from the kids because when I was a kid, I hardly ever had hot lunch, so each time I ate hot lunch it was a celebration. But, the kids didn’t complain at all as we sacked up their lunches one by one every morning. And now we have a little extra money to spend on other important things.
We do that too. The kids pick one day a week to have hot lunch. All the other days are sack lunches.
I find it hard to keep the lunch interesting though. How many ham sandwiches can you have in a week? I buy all kinds of treats or snacks to liven it up……….so I hope in the end, I’m still saving money.
What do you do to keep it interesting? Oh another thing is that I buy different breads. Like bagels, or rolls, crescents, etc.