Bring Your Lunch to Work and Send Your Kid to College

January 17, 2011

Bringing your lunch to work will help you save enough to send your kid to college?  Yeah, right.  There have been books out in the past few years talking about how if you make your coffee at home you can retire on the proceeds – David Bach coined the phrase “The Latte Factor.”  Many people thought that made sense in the 90’s when the market went up almost every year.  They could take the difference and invest it in mutual funds.  But, does it really make a difference to scrimp and save?

Seriously, I enjoy going to lunch with my girlfriends and my co-workers and let’s be totally honest – I like the food at the restaurant better than my leftovers from last night.  Do I have to bring a mashed up peanut butter and jelly sandwich and an apple like I was in grade school?  That is ridiculous.  It’s really not.  It actually does make a difference.  Doing some research the other day, I came across a calculator called the Lunch Savings Calculator under College Finance on Bankrate.com.  The name of the calculator hooked me right in so I played with it a little.

Here’s what I came up with.  Going to lunch, I spend maybe an average of about $10 and making my lunch costs about $3 – savings $7.  To be on the conservative side, let’s say I bring my lunch once a week and can earn 6% in a plan like a 529 College Saving Plan with 18 years to save.  After the child was accepted to college, I’d have $10,719 to contribute.  Granted those dollars won’t be worth as much in the future but they’ll be worth something.  They’ll be more valuable than the lunches I ate and have already forgotten.

Since I happen to like peanut butter sandwiches when they aren’t mashed, let’s say we go with bag lunches twice a week and save $14 per week – the account then doubles to $21,438.

I have to say that I really like this calculator because it makes savings real.  When a goal is over two years away, it can seem like a dream instead of a goal.  The image of a bag lunch is pretty easy to visualize especially when I remember eating all those bag lunches my Mom used to make many moons ago when I was a youngster myself.

It’s not that hard to do.