As of today, you have 100 Days Until Christmas
From now until Christmas, I will be sharing my tried and true tips for saving money on Christmas and holidays. Everything from your gift shopping, your holiday cards, teacher gifts or even Holiday Entertaining....in this economy, we all need to save some money!
Let's talk about the "B Word": you need to have a budget for Christmas and it is time to create one. Sit down and take a good hard look at your finances to see if you can get through the Holidays without putting anything on a credit card. Better yet, vow that you WILL get through the season without putting anything on the credit cards, even if that means that hard choices will have to be made about gift-giving and entertaining.
Sit down and make a list of everyone that you typically give a gift to, and how much you spend for each gift. Be honest with yourself. If you say each year that you are only going to spend $50 on a gift for your mom, but always end up spending $75...write your mom down as $75! Organized Christmas has a great gift list printable that you can use to do this.
Once you have done this, I want you to work on your overall Christmas budget. You didn't think that making a Christmas budget was just about buying gifts, did you? When creating your budget, don't just think about the gifts that you have to buy. Make sure you include any extra expenses that come up at this time of year....be it a higher tip for your hairdresser, extra money for the ingredients for your cookie baking or a new dress for the office party.
Now that you have a picture of all of the money that you think you are going to "need" to get through the next few months, it's time to take a step back, evaluate your budget and see how much of this can be reduced or eliminated.....and that is what we will talk about tomorrow.
Until then......
Make sure you that check out the rest of the Countdown To Christmas tips that I have posted! Do you have a tip to share? Submit your Holiday Savings Tips and they might be featured in a future post!
