5 Ways to Reduce Your Children’s Lunch Expenses

If you are on a tight budget, cutting down your weekly and monthly outgoings is incredibly vital. However, it’s not necessarily big things that you need to be minimized, but rather the small things that all add up, for example, your child’s lunches.

Here are five ways to reduce your children’s lunch expenses.

5 Ways to Reduce Your Children’s Lunch Expenses

1. Assistance

If your family is in a relatively low income, you should check to see if your child qualifies for reduced school lunches. However, if they do not, you should take the time to work out whether giving them a packed lunch to take with them would work out cheaper.

2. Switch it Up

Some people find that switching between school lunches and packed lunches, throughout the year can help to reduce costs, especially if packed lunches tend to differ to the varying times of the year. For example, their summer packed lunch may be different from their winter packed lunch.

3. Forward Planning

If you are giving them packed lunches, it always helps to forward plan and decide what their lunches are going to contain over a longer period of time, perhaps a week in advance or even a month, depending on how you do your grocery shopping. Forward planning allows you to work out your budget, and see how everything fits in, easily.

4. Bulk Buying

Bulk buying can be expensive initially, but if it lasts you for several packed lunches, it’s actually going to be more cost effective, especially if the grocery store has offers that you could stock up on. This is obviously only beneficial for products that have a longer shelf life.

5. In Season

We all want to encourage our kids to be healthy, which typically involves giving them fruit, but did you know that fruit is actually more expensive when it’s out-of-season? Therefore, keep an eye on which fruits are currently in season, as these will be the cheapest, and help to reduce your expenses.