If your childhood was like mine you had a lunch bag that you took to school daily or if you were really lucky you had a plastic square lunch kit with your favorite cartoon character or superhero displayed on it. And then as the maturity level increased towards grade 12 the style matured as well. These walking advertisements for the toy companies were ingenious.
But what I really want to bring up are two items debt reduction and finding extra money to invest. Now you will be noticing a common theme by now and some of it may seem repetitious. But seeing as how the primary purpose of the site is building wealth these are two topics that will be explored often.
So back to your lunch bag or lunch kit, I decided this summer in my renewed vigor of paying down debt and investing more to conduct an experiment. The experiment consisted of making my lunch as much as possible from leftovers and food already on hand. Previous to this my breakfast/lunch routine on work days typically went like this stop by the closest gas station on the way to work and buy something for breakfast. Then get to work and at lunch time either buy stuff from the grocery store or go out to a sandwich shop or restaurant. Upon conducting this experiment for 3 months my findings were this:
1) It was costing me on the average $16/day to buy my breakfast/lunch routine
2) My homemade lunches were made up of leftovers and also typically food that would have ended up spoiling anyway the joys of having little people that eat small quantities of adult size portions. So virtually my new routine was also not causing our household to go out and buy extra groceries. And as mentioned before we were wasting way less food at home.
A hidden bonus to this that I never even considered also is I am down 5lbs in body weight. In reflecting on this I am sure it has a lot to do with not buying the gas station “junk” that was making up my so called breakfast. The other disturbing notion of my very unhealthy routine in both health and wealth terms was that this what not how I was raised as a kid. So what changed?
And I can only come up with 2 reasons to not use a lunch bag none of which I am proud of laziness and convenience. Laziness in the fact I couldn’t be bothered to pack and make a lunch either the night before or spend 5 mins the next morning and make it. And also mentally tricking myself that it was more convenient to turn off the highway on my way to work and pull into the service station go inside and pick out my breakfast sometimes wait in line at the till and buy it and then get back in my truck and carry on to work. Having 2 kids by the way had further cemented in my head my justification for taking the so called “convenient” route.
I want to leave you with a few highlights…. $16/day for no realistic justification other than laziness and convenience, the potential of not wasting food at home, and also potential for weight loss. I will also for fun attach a picture of my current lunch bag(kit). Although I am thinking of taking 1 day of my new found money and buying a retro lunch kit from childhood just for novelty sake and keeping young at heart.
Would love to hear about your memorable lunch kit(bag)
