Lunch to London Update 1

So the goal was to start this week, but in actuality I decided to get a little jump and started bringing lunch last Thursday.

Now one of the challenges is that I'm not much for sandwiches. I will eat salad but I knew I'd need more variety if I'm going to do this for about a year, maybe a little more. So I got some great lunch ideas off pinterest.

Yesterday and today lunch was eggplant pizza on corn tortilla with extra tomato slices. Today is a simple combo of ground beef with brown rice and corn, which got a head start as dinner leftovers.

I mentioned that I'd be doing this for about a year. I've calculated that a year is likely to be the amount of time to save lunch money for airfare to London. Here's a rough breakdown:

Typical lunch savings each day is $7 or $35/week. Fares to London were running about $1500 which can be saved in 43 weeks. Of course fares may go up or down so I'll have to monitor fares and either adjust the timeline or explore additional ways of saving money.

I also located a resealable baggie that's now labeled, "Lunch to London' and I'm adding my daily savings to it so that the actual money saved is being redirected.

This is important, because often when we talk about saving money we really mean we spent less but the money wasn't actually 'saved' in the sense of being set aside toward something. This is an important distinction. When we focus on 'saving' by spending less we may ironically spend more. But when we focus on redirecting money we've saved then we empower ourselves and start to build our financial know-how.

I'd love to hear from you. What are you saving toward? What have you wanted to save toward?