Let’s do lunch

Continuing on to further travails of Investing, one of the biggest mistakes I’ve made turns out to be: eating lunch.

I recently read a pretty good investment article (see link below) about how much money it’ll actually cost if you eat lunch out every day. The author’s tab for $14.50 (at Panera) is only the beginning. Because it turns out that by the time you figure in taxes and lost investment growth caused by not putting that $14.50 into your retirement account the total runs to . . . over $1,200,000 in lost savings!

Of course, I didn’t know this during my career and stupidly ate lunch–day after day.

I didn’t exactly waste money on my lunches- some days I ate a PBJ especially early in my career when we didn’t have much money. I usually brown-bagged a sandwich from home, but sometimes I purchased something from the cafeteria. Rarely did I go out for lunch.

However I also wasn’t throwing the maximum into my retirement savings either.

The article’s main idea is similar to the better-known concept usually called the Latte Factor–named for the coffee drink which wastes enough money to allow most struggling wage-slaves to retire like millionaires if only they rein in their spending and direct the savings into their Roth.

The main idea is sound: spend less on stuff that you don’t really need.

https://www.kiplinger.com/personal-finance/how-to-save-money/601092/would-you-pack-your-lunch-for-12million