<p>If you are spending $6 for lunch everyday, that sounds like fast food.
Making your lunch can be cheaper and healthier, plus faster cause you wont be standing in line!</p>
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<p>6 figures is a lot of territory. A family of 5 living on 100K a year isn’t quite rich, which is a vastly different situation than that family living on 900K a year. </p>
<p>Though I agree, the problem isn’t so much people having children they can’t afford. The country needs people to have kids, and if we decided that unless a family could be middle class they couldn’t have children, we wouldn’t have many children. That’s pretty much what’s killing Japan’s economy now, and what’s going to kill Germany’s in the near future. </p>
<p>Chasing nickels and dimes is not silly. That $6 you spend for lunch each day? That’s the equivalent (assuming $6/day, 5 days/week) of 15% of my monthly food budget for four people (which includes breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks…)!</p>
<p>You bet we pay attention to nickels and dimes. We call it a budget in our house. Each paycheck is accounted for down to the penny. Extra pennies (the unexpected ones) are shuffled off to savings accounts.</p>
<p>And yes, you can make a meal for far less than $6. With meat and vegetables. Healthy, even.</p>
<p>On emergency funds - Dh and I make plenty of money each year. Many years ago, we set up (monthly, over the course of a few years) CDs as our emergency funds. They are there, and can be tapped into if absolutely necessary. Funny thing is, we use our “spending” portion of our budget for most things that aren’t already planned for - we have yet to actually use the emergency fund - knock on wood. </p>
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<p>The lunch is partially subsidized by the company I work for. I’m not just eating McDonalds every day. </p>
<p>It is true that people with less money spend more money on the little stuff because they cannot possibly ever concieve of affording the big stuff. I’m still waiting for the backstory of a person raising a family of 4 on minimum wage. Even the 19 year olds I know make more than that at service jobs. And they go to Starbucks a lot.</p>
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<p>Not enough less that I want to bother with, you may live somewhere with cheaper groceries than here. I’d say I could maybe do a lunch of meat and veggies myself for maybe $4.50 a day here. I could save a $1.50 a day, or $33 a month, but it’s just not worth it. That $1.50 is well worth the savings in time and quality of lunch (not only do I not have the cooking skills, I have to premake my lunch and have it sit until lunchtime). And using my pay per hour, I’d have to make my lunch in about 3 minutes to be worth my time. </p>
<p>I don’t see hardly anyone here bring their lunch. It’s just not done. </p>
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While I don’t necessarily think you have to watch pennies on everything, this particular argument doesn’t work, unless you are forgoing overtime in order to have time to make your lunch (or iron your own shirts, or wash your own clothes, or clean your own apartment, or make your own latte, etc.).</p>
<p>Most people choose to spend money on a few things that they could do without–the real problem is when those things multiply, and especially when they cost a lot.</p>
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<p>Yes, they are very different, but I’m betting a lot of people read it as the former. Simply because it’s pretty much impossible that 40% of Americans would be unable to somehow get 2K within 48 hours. You can most/all of that from a payday loan. Then, hell, even if no one you know has $100 to their name, almost everyone owns something they could pawn for something. A TV even. There’s a few hundred from whatever crap that is. Then they could shoplift a few cartons of cigarettes and sell them. We’re not talking about some insanely huge amount of money here. </p>
<p>Having a business of our own where I woke up poorer the next morning than the day before, it shook me to my core. I remember seeing a homeless guy outside a store thinking, at least that guys just broke! The homeless guy seemed freer than I felt at the time. The IRS literally showed up on our doorstep, the utilities were getting shut off and it was a mess. But we worked our way out of it, and someone introduced me to Dave Ramsey. It wasn’t easy by any stretch, and we lived in the get your bills paid on time for quite a long time. We stuck our heads down and plowed through. And it wasn’t done on much money at the time, just painfully planned for. To this day we keep a change jar and even loose change is saved. So yes, I subscribe to the idea that at any time disaster could strike, and I’m prepared to live for awhile with no income. </p>
<p>Yes, knowing how to cook is the key. </p>
<p>The “it’s just not done” part is killing me, though. Dh and I make six figures. We still pack lunches each day. I don’t care what my coworkers are doing for lunch, or what they may think about me bringing my lunch. We go out together occasionally, but maybe once a month or so. Dh’s private consulting firm is the same way - folks go out when they have a contractor taking them or need to take a client out. But otherwise, the break room works just fine. I also prefer to eat at my desk and use my lunch time for physical activity.</p>
<p>It takes me about five minutes at 5:30 in the morning to make three lunches (mine and the kids- dh makes his own). We use reusable ice packs to keep our lunches cold. Not complicated, and it saves a ton of money in a four person household. Everyone has an eating-out budget. The kids can buy lunch once a week - or more if they want to use their own spending money. </p>
<p>Once one has bought a house, set aside the max in 401ks, trimmed the utilities as much as possible, etc, the most malleable part of a budget comes down to the spending money and food categories. Learning how to cook a few simple dishes will give folks more flexibility. </p>
<p>(And dh and I typically choose to pack leftovers for lunch, along with some veggies and fruit. One kid loves sandwiches and one loves salads - it’s all pretty simple stuff really. Dinner is the most complicated meal of our day.)</p>
<p>It’s just not done?
Heaven forfend we don’t do anything everybody else isn’t already doing.</p>
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<p>That’s fair, I am salaried so there’s no overtime. Though it takes a very long time for that $1.50 a day (or the maybe $300 a month I really could save on food if I was being frugal) to multiply out to something all that meaningful. </p>
<p>Now, this discussion isn’t really meant to be about me or how I spend my money. Someone making minimum wage should definitely try to watch the few dollars here and there, but I myself don’t need to. My point was that often food is not the easiest place to cut. I see a lot of people I know here spending tons of money on rent and cars which can be cut to make a much more meaningful impact than cutting on food, with relatively little decrease in the quality of life. </p>
<p>I bring a Lean Cuisine for lunch. Buy them on sale. And use coupons. Scrimping and saving and using coupons and buying on sale pays off. Yes there are those who are victims of bad circumstances. I have great respect and sympathy for them. But then there are those who could easily budget their monies but instead buy the latest and greatest of everything and wouldn’t know a budget if it hit them in the arse. I have no patience for them. If more people lived like the pig in the 3 little pigs who built his house out of bricks, and less like the ones who built theirs out of sticks or straw, many could avoid scrambling for 2K.</p>
<p>There are two populations in the “can’t lay my hands on $2000”. One is so poor that it is impossible or incredibly difficult to set aside money as an emergency fund; there is no fat in the budget, no smart phone or cable or convenience foods that can be pointed to as the monetary vampires. The other population is the folks that have the means but not the will to save. Different issue. Different solutions. </p>
<p>And I agree entirely with missbwith2boys about bringing lunch, but if it makes vladenschutte happy and (s)he is doing fine with budgeting, then who am I to say how to spend his/her money? </p>
<p>Nope. And no access to credit cards. I live day to day and always afraid of what will happen to our old cars and older home. Looking forward to July when our $100/month pay off on a 2013 hospital bill will end, so I can stick that into a savings account.</p>
<p>Vladenschlutte, aren’t you a young recent graduate? Maybe I’m wrong about that but we’re mainly talking about families here. I brought my lunch to work from the time before our first was born. Just calculating $3.50 a day savings, 5 days a week, 49 weeks a year, 18 years I come up with over $15k. We’re pretty frugal so I don’t feel that savings was really spent anywhere else unnecessarily. You could say it wound up in our kid’s college funds or funded some of our family road trips when the kids were young and they got to see cool parts of the country or whatever. It’s a worthwhile amount of money.</p>
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<p>Yes, I am a recent graduate with no family. But I don’t think this is a discussion only about families, out of about 120 million households in the US, 31 million are only one person and 39 million are two people.</p>
<p>So lets look at someone who is making $30,000 a year.</p>
<p>After taxes he has $23,075 to spend (different in different states)</p>
<p>This is $1923 a month
rent -$500 $1423
health care premium ACA $209 $1214
utilities $150 $1064
food $15 day $456 $608<br>
phone $40 $568<br>
internet $50 $518
car insurance $90 $ 428<br>
gas $120 $ 308<br>
rent insurance $25 $ 283
clothes $25 $ 258
car upkeep/maint $50 $ 208
laundry $30 $ 178
haircut $20 $ 158</p>
<p>so now he has $158 a month </p>
<p>don’t get sick…co pays and out of pocket can be up to $6200 yr</p>
<p>He would like to save for retirement as he will have no pension and his job has no matching 401 k benefits…</p>
<p>he would like to buy a bed or a couch…</p>
<p>he would like to go to an occasional outing with his friends…</p>
<p>he would like to have cable or even buy a TV…</p>
<p>he would like to date…</p>
<p>he would like to save for a house…
he would like to travel to visit family…</p>
<p>from earlier quoted article " If you make more than $30,000, you earn more than 53.2% of Americans…"</p>
<p>So 53% of americans are living on the edge. </p>
<p>How in the world is the economy going to grow when half the people can only afford the basics?</p>
<p>It is true that if you already have money, it’s easier to save money - you can buy in bulk, take advantage of sales , especially on big ticket items, and pay off credit cards every month to avoid interest. The poor are additionally dinged with higher interest rates and late payment penalties. My sister (who lives paycheck to paycheck) spends money on all sorts of things that could be avoided if she had more financial cushion. She knew her hot water heater needed to be replaced for months, but she didn’t have the money, so when it failed outright, she had to pay extra for emergency service plus interest because she couldn’t pay the bill all at once. </p>
<p>This hypothetical guy finds cheaper car insurance ($90 a month?), stop leaving all his lights on all the time ($150 a month utilities?), cuts his own hair, stops putting only one item in the wash at a time ($30 for laundary a month?) and now has a few hundred a month extra. </p>