Help Your Students Save Money by Brown-Bagging, Eating In
Submitted by Arnold Trejo, Sandy Holt & John Bautista

Dining in and brown-bagging meals is one way that graduate and professional students and other adult learners can manage expenses while in school. USA Funds® Life Skills® points out that, while eating out is convenient for busy students, it also is costly.

To illustrate this point to students, financial aid administrators can provide the following chart that shows how much money students can save and earn just by packing a lunch instead of dining out during a five-day work week. The chart assumes that a packed lunch would cost about $2 per day; with a 300-percent markup, a restaurant meal would cost about $8. The chart also assumes that the student would invest the saved money, at a 5-percent interest rate.

Students can save on dinner costs too, by trying these dining-in solutions suggested by USA Funds Life Skills:

• Cook with friends.
  • Set aside one or two nights a week to cook a special meal with friends.
  • Learn to cook a new meal each month. Check out new recipes on the Web site for the Food TV network, www.foodtv.com.
  • Find cookbooks that offer easy-to-follow recipes featuring a limited number of ingredients. A few books to try are Rachael Ray’s 30-Minute Meals, Sandra Lee’s Semi-Homemade Cooking and Bobby Flay’s Boy Meets Grill.
    
    
• Start or join a cooking club. These clubs generally include up to six people who meet at least one day per month to share dishes that each of the group members prepare.
  
  
• Cook in a co-op, in which people prepare meals on a rotating basis and deliver the meals to other co-op members’ homes.

USA Funds Life Skills Module 9, “Live Like a Student – Managing Your Funds,” offers more information about saving money through brown-bagging lunch and dining in for evening meals in its section “How Do I Avoid the Bite of Dining Out?” The module also addresses other topics pertaining to helping students manage finances while in school. USA Funds Life Skills is the newest component of USA Funds’ award-winning financial-literacy program to address the unique needs of graduate and professional students and other adult learners.