Brown Bag a Free Trip to Hawaii! (no joke!)

What’s the catch? Here it goes and any­body can do it…Start pack­ing your lunches and start eat­ing din­ner at home more. Obvi­ously this con­cept isn’t new or rocket sci­ence. How­ever I promise the money you will save will get you a trip to Hawaii or what­ever des­ti­na­tion you’re dream­ing about. I stum­bled across this cool lunch sav­ings cal­cu­la­tor (why not use it for din­ner too) that opened my eyes to how much I could save by mak­ing bal­anced changes. Below is an exam­ple of how I can cut back and save. You will be shocked! This is a must read…

My Results–

LUNCH– Cur­rently I am eat­ing out 4 lunches a week at $10 a pop. If I just cut that in half (and my brown bag lunches are $3 a pop) to 2 lunches out a week I save $672 a year!

DINNER– Cur­rently I am eat­ing out 3 din­ners a week that vary from a quick run to Rubios or a relax­ing din­ner sip­ping saki and eat­ing Alba­core Spe­cial rolls. If I cut that back to eat­ing out just once a week I could pocket, drum roll please… $960.00 a year!

That’s a grand total of $1632.00 of sav­ings a year! Enough to get myself a ticket to Hawaii, stay at a great hotel, rent a car and drink plenty of Mai Tai’s!

Notice this cal­cu­lated just my own per­sonal sav­ings. The real­ity is my whole fam­ily (3 of us) would do it as well, and our sav­ings would be over $4,000.00.  Hav­ing gone to Maui this past fall, I can say that is plenty of money for a fam­ily of 3 to frolic on the white sands of Hawaii.

You Can Do It–

In order to actu­ally save the money, it would be wise to cal­cu­late your monthly sav­ings and actu­ally set it aside by deposit­ing it into your des­ig­nated vaca­tion sav­ings account. (for exam­ple on the last day of each month) Oth­er­wise the money might just get spent some­where else like going to the movies or buy­ing a cool gift for me. Do what­ever works for you, just be sure to do some­thing to put it aside as it’s being saved!

So if you are cut­ting back due to the econ­omy and are won­der­ing how you are ever going to get to go on vaca­tion again, maybe this could be your solution.We are going to put this to the test. I will give you updates now and then on our progress. More impor­tantly I will give tips and tricks to mak­ing great brown bag lunches! No peanut but­ter and jelly recipes here!! Stay tuned…