Welcome to 31 Days to Organize Your Finances. By the end of the month, my goal is to help you have a detailed financial plan for your family. We’ll talk about cash flow, budgets, debts, and all of the nitty gritty of our finances that might not be fun to talk about, but are so important to discuss. Please refer back to the original post for a complete list of daily assignments.
The holiday season is just around the corner, and along with the festivities comes the gift buying frenzy. Since the underlying theme of this series is planning and budgeting, today’s assignment is to create a gift giving fund.
To get started, download my FREE Christmas Gift Spending & Budget excel spreadsheet and start planning your Christmas spending budget TODAY, if you have not done so already.
Secondly, I also want you to brainstorm all of your other gift spending through out the year. Download another budget (but save under a different name) for your other yearly gift giving. Gift giving isn’t just a December sport. There are birthdays, anniversaries,weddings, babies, graduations, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Valentine’s Day and many more days to plan for. We need to plan for gift giving all year long.
I like to keep my budgets separate, since Christmas is so much larger than the rest of the year, but you can use one spreadsheet for everything if you’d like.
After you complete the budgets, divide the totals by 12. You should be setting aside those amounts each month for your yearly gift giving. If possible, set the money aside in a separate savings account earmarked specifically for gift spending.
If you haven’t started saving for this upcoming Christmas, you will need to scramble to find that money NOW, so you won’t feel compelled to use a credit card. For some quick tips on finding money, read 31 Days to Find $1000.
If money is really tight this Christmas, use your imagination (and Pinterest) to think of gift ideas that are really inexpensive or FREE. For one of my favorite ideas, read A Simple & Frugal Gift Idea or follow my Handmade Gift Ideas Pinterest board where I will be pinning holiday gift ideas.
Have you started planning for Christmas gifts yet? Do you save money every month for your gift spending? Let us know in the comments.
When our income was regular, we had a monthly budget for gifts throughout the year and we put a little aside for Christmas gifts. We are no longer in a position where we can purchase gifts for the most part. We try to celebrate with special homemade meals, maybe with a few extras we normally wouldn’t have. We find inexpensive ways to have fun or give gifts that are experiences or services. For Christmas, our family participates in the Advent Conspiracy. You can read about how we give charitably in my post “Christmas in July”. As that is for charity, we don’t consider that to be gift money, but rather tithing or giving money. We find creative ways to afford this because it is important to us. Great post! We should always be thinking and planning ahead as much as possible.
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