You always hear people say that the small stuff adds up. Let's play with some numbers and figure out just how much. Not all of these fit this blog's mandate (mainly, do not impact your quality of life) but many of them are changes you can make without changing anything really.
Let's first define some metrics. There's 365 days in a year. There's 52.1 weeks in a year. For simplicity let's say that there's 104 days in the year where you do not work (assuming 5 day work weeks). That leaves 261 days of work. Subtract your 10 holidays and a sick day, let's stick with the nice rounded number of 250 days a year where you go to work.
Purchasing Food:
1. Daily coffee @ $1.45 = $362.50
Add a bagel @ $1.25? Make that $675/yr.
2. Daily fast-food lunch combo @ $8.00 = $2000
Making @ Home:
1. Coffee at home
(We Buy PC Organic Fair-Trade Coffee, $8.99/pound, and it lasts about 3 wks.)
So we buy about 18 pounds of coffee yearly resulting in $161.32. And that includes coffee for both of us in the morning and on the weekends, and the coffee is quite a bit better.
2. Lunch
I eat a pretty simple lunch usually, I get it from my Dad. I usually have:
1 peanut butter sandwich with honey
1 Apple
1 Banana
tapwater to drink.
Total cost for this lunch is probably around $2.50 a day, if that. So lets say $625/yr.
Differential
Coffee -> $362.50 - $161.32 = $201.18
Lunch -> $2000 - $625 = $1375
Total Savings: $1576. And that's not even trying!
You might claim my lunch isn't interesting enough. I'm definitely in a minority eating the same simple lunch day after day. But you don't need to chose something that simple! Just buy it from the grocery store and instantly you will be saving over 50% of the cost for the unhealthy fast-food alternative.
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