Believe it or not, out in the business world you can save yourself a whole lot of moola. Heres five ways

1) Lay off the starbucks
Eating out is expensive but sometimes it cant be avoided. Drinking out is expensive but sometimes it can’t be avoided. Drinking starbucks is expensive and can ALWAYS be avoided. I used to drink starbucks a lot, and I mean a lot. Then I realized I was spending almost $200/month on freaking coffee. I learned to like regular coffee and diet dr pepper. Both much cheaper.

2) Split lunch with another person
Personally I eat about six times a day and I can’t handle huge huge dinner and lunches. If there is someone else that you go to lunch with that is the same way, there is no harm in splitting something. Some foods (Fajitas) lend themselves well to this. Other foods do not.

3) Bring your lunch
Ok ok this one is obvious but its more flexible than you might think. I have someone on my team at work that brings his food to work but will still “go out to lunch” to hang out and not miss out on a lot of the planning and work talk that goes on at lunch. If you have to buy something, buy something small and then gorge your huge appetite on your lunch you brought from home…or the other way around, take your pick.

4) Learn the lunch specials
Learn where there are lunch specials and then suggest those places to colleagues. I can think of one place I like to go that if I can hit the right special day I can eat and be full for 3 bucks while everyone else spends 15. Hell you can work this out with dates too.

5) Use coupons
There are entertainment books for almost every bigger city or town that have coupons for local restaurants. There are also websites that allow you to print coupons out for various restaurants.

Lets go through and see just how much that can save:
1) we’ll go easy and say $7/day on starbucks: $7 - $1 diet dp = 6$ a day Monthly savings: $180.00

2) Say 3 days of the work week you split a lunch: Instead of $15/meal, $7.50/meal. Monthly savings: $22.50

3) Say 1 day a week you just plain bring lunch. $60 - $10 in groceries for the month Monthly savings: $50.00

4) Say 1 day a week, $12 savings. Monthly savings: $48

5) Lets say for dinners you normally go out 3 times out of the week and spend $30/meal. If you used coupons and cut that down to $20/meal. Monthly savings: $120

Just doing a few little things can save you literally a hundred bucks a week. Lets put that in perspective…lets say you did that and put that extra $400+ a month in savings instead. In a year you’d have almost 5 grand…just by cutting back and eating smarter.

I know this is extreme case and if you are reading this, you probably don’t spend that much on food…then again many of you might. So go ahead, save yourself five grand.

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