We’ve all heard the advice before that you should take lunch to work with you instead of hitting Starbucks/Panera/Subway/McDonald’s every day because it’s so much cheaper, right? Same old boring slag. WE KNOW. Today, however, I present to you a new curveball in the brown-bagging argument – why not eat your lunch while you work, and get paid for it?
I sense some situational awareness may be needed here. At my particular place of employment, we don’t have to eat lunch. Let me rephrase… we don’t have to take a lunch break. Generally, on second shift, if you take a lunch during an 8 hour day, you’re not working hard enough. Just like working only 8 hours isn’t working hard enough on our shift. Because we work until the work is done, lunch breaks just serve to make the day even longer, not shorter.
I am one of the few guys on my shift that has regularly taken a lunch break. I’d go home (a whole 5 blocks, remember), eat while I’m watching TV, and hop on over back to work. Sounds great, right? I hardly have to go anywhere, and I’m not spending any money on lunch, because it’s food that I already have at home. And I only lose a couple of hours a week because of it. Overtime hours. Meh, a small price to pay for a nice, relaxing half hour break off of my feet. Right? WRONG!
Two and a half hours in lost overtime every week never seemed like much in itself, but after some helpful reminding from my supervisor last night that I’d be better off financially if I didn’t take lunch breaks, I finally decided to run the numbers.
Note: Yes, I used to do C++, and yes, I had a hard time resisting writing out a function for this exercise
Almost $200 per month I’ve been pissing away by taking lunch breaks. Unbelievable. A quick glance at my snowball spreadsheet shows my current monthly snowball increasing from $300 to $500, my overall interest expenses decreasing by almost $700, and my final payoff moving forward by a staggering NINE MONTHS from August 2014 to November 2013.
Naturally, I took my lunch with me to work today, and ate my shrimp lasagna while picking baseboards.
So there you have it, folks – not only can brown-bagging it at work save you money on lunch, it can actually pay you, too! Big raise style, even!
My next step is to do whatever educational stuff it is that I was supposed to have done a long time ago at orientation time that will supposedly result in a 50 cent raise – another thing I’ve been passing off as too miniscule to bother with, but will actually add another $100 per month. I’ll be rich soon enough, I swear!
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haha im wondering how a person eats shrimp lasagna and picks basboards but i’ll trust that you’re doing it as neatly as you can.
you know, with this attitude, you WILL be rich in no time!
my husband used to do this until his company cut out all overtime. it was a good way to get a few extra $$$$.