How that salad at lunchtime is no bargain

Eating out work days is convenient and eases boredom, but it could tally up to $2,450 a year

“Hey, wanna go for lunch?”

It’s a friendly question asked in offices and at schools everywhere. There’s an endless buffet of restaurants, food trucks and takeout options available, so it’s easy to grab a quick bite and go.

If you regularly fork over a few bucks for a midday meal, maybe it’s time to calculate the cost, because ordering lunch could be chewing through your savings.

Canada’s Food Price Report, published by Dalhousie University and the University of Guelph, says a four-person family spends $3,585 per year on food away from home in 2018 — amounting to almost $300 per month or $17 per person each week.

“By 2035 or even sooner, we could see most Canadian households spending half of their food budget at restaurants,” the report says.

These numbers are a little fat because they include all meals at a variety of food-service outlets. But with the full scope of our dining-out expenses on the table, let’s focus on calculating the cost of lunch.

How much is a takeout lunch these days? It’s not hard to blow $10 on a salad or sandwich.

If you grab a $10 lunch once each working week, you’re spending about $490 per year. A five-day-a-week sandwich habit brings your total to $50 per week, or $2,450 per year. Gulp!

The truth is, a $10 lunch is cheap. If you’re working downtown, dropping $15 on a hot meal with a beverage is easy. So a $15 dish once a week is $735 a year, or $3,675 annually if you dine out five times a week.

But no one does this, right? Wrong. A survey by Visa Canada suggests 60 per cent of Canadians take out lunch once or more a week, with 20 per cent of Ontarians heading to an eatery three or more times a week.

While buying the odd lunch might not seem like a big deal, it does add up. It’s easy to spend a lot of money for a little bit of convenience. Imagine if you socked away some of that lunch money in a Tax-Free Savings Account or an RRSP instead. You could retire earlier just by brown-bagging your meal more often.

Packing your lunch is a big wealth builder and the savings are staggering. A frugal $4 homemade lunch — either a sandwich or leftovers from dinner — served five days a week costs $980 per year. That’s 245 days of total lunches.

The bottom line is a $4 brownbag lunch saves you $1,470 per year over a $10 lunch, and a substantial $2,695 compared to a $15 takeout meal. That’s nearly $3,000 in savings, just on lunch.

Seeing the math is one thing, but changing the habit and skipping the convenience is the challenge. Here are three tricks to make it work:

Calculate your hours worked My favourite way to put costs into perspective is to tally how many hours you must work to pay for something.

If you earn $16 per hour, that $15 lunch costs you well over an hour of work — yes, you’ve got to subtract income taxes.

Consider the total paycheques spent

How many paycheques do you eat for lunch? Buying a daily $10 lunch at work costs $50 per week or $2,450 per year.

If your annual income is $75,000 and you get paid twice a month, that’s one after-tax paycheque you’ve just eaten.

Start a lunch bunch

Taking a midday break is a key reason many of us enjoy getting out of the office for a nosh. Eating alone at your desk lacks the camaraderie and escape often needed during the day.

So counter the cost of takeout by starting a lunch bunch at your office. Make a point to dine together a few times a week, share meals, do a potluck and track your savings on a chart.

Lunching outside in a park or going for a walk after eating in the office lunch room might just be the key to breaking the spending habit.