Office worker saves $2,500 a year by packing this simple, nutritious $1.25-a-day meal

We all theoretically want to eat cheaply for lunch, but that’s easier said than done if you have a fancy smoothie joint across the street or a sick sub shop around the corner. It takes a lot of discipline to prioritize your savings over your cravings, especially when work is stressful and your mid-day meal is the burst of joy that keeps you humming. It helps, though, if you're aiming to pocket a concrete dollar amount—especially if it's enormous.

Someone recently shared a motivating online anecdote about their thrifty coworker, who "eats the exact same $1.25 meal every day"—with absolutely no exceptions. After reviewing his budget and crunching the numbers, he calculated a savings of over $2,500 annually compared to his previous habit of eating out for lunch.

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Eating lunch for $1.25 every day—and resisting temptation

Reddit user spellsboxing shared the details in the r/Frugal channel, breaking down the meal in question: "one hard-boiled egg, a scoop of rice, and half an avocado." Crucially, this routine includes "No snacks, no drinks besides water. Just that. Every. Day." While the OP initially thought the co-worker was pursuing a strict diet or hurting financially, that wasn’t the case. "[He’s] just super into optimizing his expenses," they wrote. "He meal-preps [the food] in bulk on Sunday, packs it into identical containers, and doesn’t seem to get bored at all." Amazingly, he isn’t even tempted when someone orders pizza or brings in a box of donuts: "He politely declines and says, 'Already got my lunch.'"

From there, the thread branches out into a chaotic swirl of replies suggesting cheap eats, marveling at his lunch discipline, and theorizing about how he doesn’t get bored or frustrated with the lack of variety. In the top comment, one person suggested that the frugal-lunch guy might not even care about what he eats. "Some people just don’t like food," they wrote. "They just see eating as a necessary bodily function and nothing more. I suspect that might be this guy’s secret." In response, someone added, "I came in to say this. Some people eat because they have to, not because they want to. You can usually tell because they are ones meal-prepping and eating the exact same thing the whole week. They don't want to think about food. It's the people that say, 'If you give me a pill and I wouldn't have to eat, I would take the pill.'"

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Other cheap-lunch alternatives

In one popular reply, a user recommended a go-to cheap meal: "I make shakshuka (tomatoes, onion, eggs, bell pepper, spices) about twice a week. The whole thing costs about $12 for 6 meals (which is $2 per meal). I guarantee you it tastes 100 times better than his $1.25 meal and has a lot more nutrients and vitamins." Elsewhere, someone chimed in: "Fried egg over rice with a little soy sauce. Maybe another $0.10 more. But so. much. more. appetizing…. I can actually do that most days."

Of course, if you’re looking for inexpensive and healthy lunch ideas, there are plenty of articles on that subject written by dietitians—including one by Jessica Ball, M.S., RD at Eating Well. "Eating in a way that helps reduce inflammation doesn't have to be expensive," Ball writes. "[I]n fact, many ingredients like canned fish, beans, frozen berries, and rice pack an anti-inflammatory punch without breaking the bank."

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