Happy New Year!
Now is the perfect time to start planning of Christmas 2014. Now? Yes. Now is the perfect time to look back over what you just spent on each person for Christmas and who you forgot to buy for. Make a list of each person, and how much you spent on them total. I prefer to use Microsoft Excel for this as it is easy to manipulate the figures. Mine starts off like this.
Hubs $49.86
Fred $302.01
Lilo $302.01
Then I've added:
My parents
The Inlaws
My brother and his wife
My Brother in laws and their wives
6 Nieces
1 Nephew
Each child's teacher
A budget for exchanging gifts at school
My office
My boss
Hub's counter part at work
Hub's employees
Our neighbor
I ended up spending right at $1000 this year.
Now that you know what you spent this year, are you happy with that? Did you over spend and need to spend less? Are you hoping to better prepare and spend more this year? Adjust the numbers to reflect what you would like to spend. I then automatically add $100 for someone who may come into our lives this year that we would like to buy for, or in case we find the perfect gift for someone that is slightly more that budgeted.
My adjusted figure for next year is $1500.
Now how am I going to come up with that money? You can put back a certain amount each month, or if you know you are going to get a bonus at work, plan on putting that money towards your goal. We like to pull at least the kids presents portion out of our tax refund. Them having presents on Christmas is the most important for us and if everything else falls through and it's a rough year, we still want their Christmas to be amazing. We will place $800 in a savings account that can't be accessed from our checking account when we get our refund.
We will also put back $50 each month for Christmas (Another $600 total). The other $100 we plan to take out of mine or the hubby's overtime. We both regularly get paid for working overtime or holidays so this is a pretty safe option.
What is your plan to finance Christmas next year?
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