Save money on school lunches or any time the kids need to pack a lunch! Use these easy tips for preparing school lunches for the week in 30 minutes on the weekend.
Save $400 on school lunches this year!
These days in America, it seems that everyone is so busy that preparing school lunches is liable to push a typical mom right over the edge. When you have to choose between making school lunches or spending that extra 15 minutes in bed, it seems like buying ready made school lunches at the store is a no-brainer, but your budget doesn’t agree.
The average mom packs $2.00 worth of pre-packaged goodies into each school lunch she sends to school with her kids. (That works out to $720 for 2 kids.) What mother hasn’t wondered if those lunches are even getting eaten and if there’s an easier way to save money on school lunches?
Try these easy tips for things you can do in 30 minutes or less on the weekend to save money on school lunches and make preparation a snap!
Easy Tips To Save Money on School Lunches
- Those snack bags of munchies cost a lot! Make your own by pre-packaging chips, pretzels, animal crackers and other snack items into sandwich bags on the weekends. (Have the kids help!) Store them in a big container or basket and just throw them in the lunch box in the morning.
- Let the kids create their own Pizza lunch kits- Toast bread and cut out little circles with a biscuit cutter. Add small containers of pizza sauce, cheese, and other toppings.
- Make fruit gelatin and pudding and put in small plastic containers for the week. Make a large batch of granola bars, cookies, pumpkin bread, banana bread or muffins. Divide them into zip top sandwich bags and freeze so that you can grab one or two when needed.
- Brownie bites are simple to make. Bake brownie mix in mini-muffin pans and put three “brownie bites” in a sandwich bag for each child’s lunch. They freeze well too!
- Fill thermos (not glass) half full with juice the night before and freeze. In the morning, remove from freezer and fill the rest of the way. The juice will be cold when the kids are ready to drink it and it keeps their food cold too.
- Clean vegetables, slice into pieces and bag. Preparing a weeks worth of veggies at a time for lunches and snacks saves money and time.
- Purchase cheese in blocks, cut into pieces and put in sandwich bags.
- Save napkins, catsup and mustard packets you get from take-out. Use in lunches.
For more tips to help you save money on school lunches and other kids’ expenses, check out our Saving With Kids e-books.
Zucchini Slaw Recipe – Great Way To Use Garden Leftovers!
Jill-
I completely agree with keeping dinner simple. Actually, in our home, we only have dinner on Sundays; our regular evening meals are just simple suppers. Would you mind posting some of your favorite go-to simple meals? I have your “Dining on a DIme cookbook” – love it, and also your “Menus on a Dime” – love it too. But I am wondering what your basic evening meals usually are. In our home we have about 10 basic meals that we enjoy all the time and just rotate them about with leftovers and cold meals on a tray.
Thanks for the inspiration!
Lorelai
I always say most people have 10 meals they serve over and over. Which isn’t as boring as it sounds because when you think about it the one meal only gets served 3 times a month which isn’t that bad. As far as my basic evening meals if you have Menus on a Dime then those are what I usually used. I liked too, at different times in my life, not to make a menu but to keep a notebook with a list of meats -roasted chicken, roast, meatloaf, – then a list of sides like baked potato, French fries, mashed potatoes, mac and cheese – salads, tossed, fruit, relish dish- veggies, peas, carrots, green beans. Then if I had chicken on hand I would pick something (2-4 things) from the other lists to go with it.
Actually I pretty much do like you do. Some nights I just have leftovers, every man for themselves (each person makes their own)sometimes and the cold meals too. I could never make a month’s worth of menus or anything like that because my life was such I couldn’t always plan on from one hour to the next what I would be doing let alone a week ahead of time so I had to adjust my meals each day to what was going on at the moment.
Hope this helps.
Thank you, Jill!
Lorelai
You are welcome Lorelai. Hope it helped.
We are very lucky I guess my grandkids school serves free breakfast and lunch, the food they serve looks and tastes good for breakfast they get fresh and canned fruit and a choice of two juices milk and either a hot food or cold cereal. Lunch they serve fresh fruit and vegetables green salad a hot dish or sandwich milk. Late afternoon they send a bag of fruit or vegetables to each classroom fora snack. I have had lunch with them and the food really is good but you still have kids throwing a lot of food away our school is a very low income