How do you spend your lunch hour?

Lining up in a cafeteria queue? Combing the streets for food?

Or are you the type of person who brings your own lunch that you prepared the night before?

In a budgetary sense, the obvious choice should be to take your own lunch to work. In some ways you miss out on the mystery of having a different meal prepared for you each day, but the savings are huge.

I would imagine, for simplicities sake that most people would spend on average around $10 on lunch. If you buy a $2 salad or some other bargain like that then keep going, you are on to something good! Most people, however, would say that $10 might even be a little on the conservative end.

The maths looks like this:

$10 per day x 5 working days in a week x 48 working weeks = $2,400 per year.

Want to hear something crazy? Doing this over a 45 year working life equates to $108,000 of after-tax, hard earned income!

This one simple change could potentially pay off your home loan.

A few important considerations however is that you should still occasionally go out with your peers on occasion. Don’t be a Neville Nofriends (apologies if your name is Neville).

The other factor is to consider though, is that if you were to do this every day, it would lose that special feeling. Things done repetitively can quickly lose their sense of excitement.

One way to physically see the change is to put the money you save each week in a jar. After a month, count it out and bank it. The financial momentum you gain will make the change you made seem worth it.