Saving Money with Packed Lunches: CHIPS

Okay so those of you who read the blog know that my husband does summer sales. What you probably haven't even considered though is lunches. He is gone every. single. day. all. day. long. (except Sundays) What this means is he is out working during lunch time. Well most guys, especially single guys in his past offices got takeout for lunch almost daily. Okay so yeah you make a lot of money with sales $5 a day, no big deal right?! WRONG! It adds up and it adds up fast. $5 fast food is a cheap fast food lunch. If you get fries and a drink or shake or extra add ons, it costs even more. Lets do a little bit of math. There is close to 100 knocking days for a door-to-door salesman. Some stay longer, some stay less. Lets just base it off 100. If a sales rep only spends $5 on a lunch that is $500 just on lunches!!! Most people spend more than that. If they are spending that kind of money you just go ahead and take off a weeks worth of work or so to pay for your lunches. This doesn't include dinner, snacks, drinks, breakfast, or any other living expenses.

So with this factor in mind, I pack his lunches. And I also decided with all the free time on my hands while he is gone, that I will share some of my secret tips to packing a lunch and saving money with packing lunches to make them even cheaper.

Todays post is about chips. I know this is probably silly but I also know that people out there a spending way more than they should on chips. I was one of those poor souls trapped in that. Until I figured out the new DIY world that I have been loving.

Now you have all seen those big boxes that you can get at WALMART or TARGET or SAMS CLUB of variety chips in one person portion sized bags. Yes they are convenient. Yes they have a good variety. And they are really easy to just pop in a lunch sack and send them on their way. But our summers are all about making/saving money so that the hubs doesn't have to work during school. (This year he will because we have a LOT more school coming up that is EX PEN SIVE). So I am all about saving the dough. Okay so these prepackaged boxes of chips range in price but are usually about $6.00 for a bag of 20 individual packs. So that is about $0.30 for a bag. Not bad really but you are going to LOVE this.

So our local grocery store here in Minnesota is Cub Foods. So naturally this is where we end up shopping. Well they had some of their chips 3 bags for $6 so that is $2 for a big bag of chips. And they just happend to be some of our favorite chips. Kettle Cooked Lays and Cheetos. So I decided to 'prepackage my own chips.' It only took me about 10 minutes to do this so for those of you that don't have much time on your hands you can still do this.

I got a bunch of ziplock baggies and went to work. First I tried to decide on a good size portion of chips. Seeing as he doesn't just eat chips for lunch, I used a good size handful for my measurement.

I added this to a ziplock baggie. Be sure to squish out all the air. You will see why at the end of the post. Also I am sure that this will keep them fresh longer so just do it. 

Continue to bag all of your individual size baggies. 

All right now that you have all your individual baggies, now is time to store them. Where are you going to keep all these little bags? Well first your going to wipe out that convenient bag that you got your chips in with a paper towel. 

Then because you squished out all the extra air in the baggies in the previous steps you can now conveniently fit all of the individual baggies in this bag. 

I folded the top ridge of the bag inside. See above picture.

Then you can even add a clothespin, paperclip or chip bag pincher (ha ha don't know the name but you get the idea) to the top to keep it closed. How convenient. Now you don't have to label the individual flavors of chips. Plus it will keep your chips fresher longer in case someone doesn't shut the bag completely. 

Check out my bags of chips filled with my own 'prepackaged' chips. 

Okay so back to this math of mine. Was it worth it?!

I got 11 baggies out of each big bag of chips. 

I got 33 individual bags of chips from my 3 big bags of chips. So that makes each individual baggie just $0.18. Now those of you might not think that is a big savings, but over the course of the summer if the hubbie took chips every single day for the 100 days of summer he would spend $18.00 on chips verses $30.00 buying the prepackaged ones. This saves $12.00 just over the summer on CHIPS. Who the heck wants to spend a lot of money on chips? You eat em then they are gone. So it might not seem like much but add it with all of my other summer lunch saving ideas and you will have yourself a yummy inexpensive home lunch!!