Readers: The holidays are coming! The holidays are coming! Start budgeting now. Make a list (and check it twice…)!
And remember: The holidays are not emergencies. They’re not reasons to dip into savings. You have time. We’re all getting ahead together here! We’re not going to make payments. We’re going to pay!
So let’s plan together. This is how my wife and I work through our Christmas list:
- Decide how much money we can set aside for holidays (total);
- Make a list of who we want to buy gifts for;
- Allocate the total among the people on our list;
- Cross out the people we already have gifts for (more detail below);
- Shop for deals to maximize the distance our budget can travel; and
- Stick to the budget!
Doing it this way takes a lot of the financial sting out of the holiday shopping. Plus, we don’t have anything to pay back in January! But we don’t wait until September to buy a gift if we find an amazing gift, for an amazing price under what we usually spend on Christmas gifts. When this happens, we revisit our budget for that month to include that gift and exclude some discretionary item.
Note though that we generally spend around the same every year, so steps one and three are generally known months in advance. (But we still write it out every fall anyhow.) And we generally have one or two gifts already purchased by the time September hits. This year we have one I’m about to order and another we’re looking at this weekend.
Here are a few more reasons budgeting this way helps us:
- It takes a lot of the stress out of holiday shopping because we can buy gifts over time instead of 12 gifts in one day…;
- This reduction of stress and addition of time allows us to find something we believe our relatives will actually like within a budget; and
- We don’t worry about playing favorites. Everyone is treated fairly;
We know a lot of people have different strategies for holiday gifts. This one works well for us. If we can’t find the “perfect” gift, we generally get little kids a savings bond and small toy and parents and grandparents a fallback of a gift certificate to a restaurant that is special to them or something we can all do together. And baby pics are very popular these days, too… And we usually do a Yankee swap with everyone else.
Our relatives generally are all on the same page with holidays and gifts. Yankee swaps are appreciated because everyone buys only one gift (I usually end up with an apron though or a nice “blouse”…).
The kids like the small toys and we like setting aside a small amount to grow (slowly grow, but still grow).
And our parents don’t need anything, so we like to send them out for a meal – an experience together they may not otherwise have – on us. (We like doing a Restaurant.com gift certificate plus an extra gift card directly from the restaurant (depending on the restaurant.com restrictions) so they can have a complete meal). The baby pics are the wild cards – and pretty cheap too.
What do y’all do for the holidays? Who plans? How do you plan? If you’ve never planned before try this year! Spread the gifts among three or four months (ending in December – starting in September or October). And then start shopping. Stretch out those dollars too if you can.
And, above all, I don’t want to see anyone still paying in January! So put your credit card down and slowly step away from the mall!
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