Brown Bag It
February 1, 2014
One way is to bring lunch to work, for starters it can certainly be much tastier than the offerings you can get from many a canteen or food court. Moreover, you can keep to any organic, vegetarian and/or minus food allergen type of diet of your choosing much easier.
At $10 a lunch, for 5 days a week for 1 year is $2400, assuming 4 weeks vacation. Clearly $24,000 over ten years is nothing to be sniffed at, and that is before adding compound interest of say 8% a year from the stock market taking it up to ~$36,500.
The next step is to look at your breakfast and evening meal. Can you eat out less, and when you do, can it be in a more frugal manner? Maybe just drink water, or skip the desert, no doubt your waste line will certainly appreciate it! it is very easy to hit a couple of thousand a year in dinning expenses. Again, if you can drop this down significantly, you could save perhaps another ~36,500 over ten years.
Now this is where the numbers start to get really interesting (if numbers ever really get that interesting). Assuming an average investment return of 8%, and you keep this practice up for 10 years, you will have saved a grand total of $73,178.41, nothing special but still a fair chunk of change. Now make it 20 years, and it’s $235,608.17, at 30 years it’s $596,143.78 and after 40 years it is a whopping $1,396,403.13.