What’s for lunch? Small choices add up to big changes

When we found ourselves away from home last week at lunch time, we were faced with a decision. Should we dine at home on leftover baked macaroni and cheese and garlic-roasted cauliflower? Or should we eat out?

Our children were hungry and had overheard the lunch conversation my husband and I were having. They favored eating out and were shouting their opinions from the back of our van. We had fully intended to indulge our own desires (and theirs), when something made me rethink the decision.

To eat out, we would have driven past our home (and perfectly good leftovers waiting in our fridge), had to wrangle four squirmy, overtired children into a restaurant, and would have spent about $30 on a meal that we would have only marginally enjoyed. It didn’t exactly make sense to eat out when we considered all of these things.

So we went home and ate our leftovers, eating food we’d already paid for and that tasted better than the fare we might have driven out of our way to get. It seems so simple now, but making decisions about how and what to eat aren’t always so easy. In fact, food can be downright complicated.

We eat because we need food to survive, but the way we eat is influenced by many factors, including our habits, social circles, our lifestyles, our jobs, and our expectations. Once we start a pattern of behavior, it’s difficult to examine just why we do what we do. We just keep doing it because it’s what we’ve always done.

Maybe you are so accustomed to always being busy that it seems natural to order take-out or buy frozen lasagna. Perhaps you’ve never felt comfortable in the kitchen, so you feel it’s easier to buy convenience foods. If you’re single, it can be more palatable to eat out than to eat alone. If you have a large family, it can be overwhelming to come up with new meal ideas every day, so you rely on prepackaged foods instead.

Over the last several months, my husband and I have become increasingly aware of how we spend our food dollars. To break out of our own patterns of behavior, we had to acknowledge that we wanted to make a change. Then, we had to find the motivation to help make this change possible.

One particularly effective method for creating change has been to ask ourselves, “What if we did (x) instead of (x)?” For example, if you’re tired of eating lunch out but never seem to have the time or motivation to pack one, what if you spent an hour preparing make-ahead meals instead of watching television? Or what if you got out your slow cooker and tossed in the ingredients for a meal instead of scrambling to make dinner when you got home?

What do you really want? What choices could you make that will help you reach your goals? For example, if you made your lunch instead of buying it, how much money might you save? What else could you do with that money? Perhaps you want to build up your savings so you have an emergency fund, or you want to buy a new car or computer. Maybe you could take a vacation.

It might take months of choosing to pack your lunch instead of eating out to save enough money to reach your goal. But when you’re enjoying your car or relaxing on a sunny beach, will you regret those burgers you didn’t eat?

With thoughtful planning, the choices you make now (including eating leftovers) can pay off in satisfying ways in the future.

Your eating habits may be keeping you from reaching your goals

Last week, faced with a slightly unappealing piece of homemade lasagna I had packed for lunch, I accepted an invitation to go to lunch with two of my co-workers. We settled on fast food, where I ordered a chicken sandwich, a side salad, and hot fudge sundae, spending $3.21. I silently congratulated myself on my frugality. Of course, given that I had lunch in the refrigerator at the office, I wasn’t being frugal at all.

While we sat in our corner booth, both my co-workers mentioned that they wanted to eat out less. One commented about the power of the up-sell; he’d planned to buy a snack and spend less than $3. Instead, he bought a meal and an iced coffee and spent nearly twice as much as he had intended. The other ordered a $5 salad.

This lunch scenario reflects how complicated our decisions about food can be. According to Cornell University professor Dr. Brian Wansink, we make approximately 220 decisions about food every day. That’s a lot of decisions, most of which probably seem small, but together, they can have a significant financial impact. Sure, my lunch only cost about $3, but it was money I hadn’t planned on spending. I also threw away the lasagna and accidently left the chocolate bar I had packed melting in my car, which just upped the ante on my supposed $3 lunch.

Nationally, American households spent an average of $7,514 on food last year--$2,736 of this amount went to eating out. Do you know how much you spent last year on food? If not, you should, particularly when you consider that your eating habits could be keeping you from building an emergency fund, saving for a down payment on a house, taking a vacation, funding your retirement, or reaching your other personal financial goals.

This doesn’t mean you need to stock up on 10-cents-a-package instant soup or stop eating out, but you might consider ways to become more intentional with your food budget. What could you do with the money you’d save by eating out half as much? How much money would you save if you prepared and froze meals ahead of time instead of hitting the grocery store several times a week? What if you bought an inexpensive French press and brewed your own coffee at home or the office? Small changes can add up to a significant amount of savings.

Consider a homemade breakfast burrito. At first, a $2 burrito at a fast food restaurant seems inexpensive. However, I made my own sausage and egg burritos at home for 98 cents each, including tax. Without the sausage, the cost drops to 68 cents—plus, I have more control over what I’m putting into my food. I used all-natural sausage and farm fresh eggs I purchased from my niece. Even when I paid a premium for these ingredients ($3.69 and $2 respectively), the total cost of each burrito was half what it would have cost at a restaurant.

When I add a glass of not-from-concentrate orange juice (42 cents per serving), my total at-home cost increases to $1.40. By comparison, a small orange juice costs $1.59 at a fast food restaurant, bringing the total amount spent for a burrito and drink to $3.59, plus tax. If I ate a homemade breakfast burrito three days a week, instead of eating out, I’d save about $30 a month, or $360 a year.

What could you or I do with $360 a year besides order fast food? That question surely will inspire me to think more carefully about how I spend my food budget.