Gift Budget – Create a gift budget for a holiday or the year!
March 9, 2009 by The Frugal Home
Filed under Budget, Christmas, Gifts, Holidays, Personal Finance
When creating their financial budgets, many people forget to add a gift budget. A gift budget will help you be able to buy those monthly gifts such as birthday and anniversary gifts, and help you save money during the holidays.
It is not difficult to create a gift budget and it may take you under an hour to make a gift budget for the entire year. Grab your calendar and make a list of all the birthdays, anniversaries, and special events you buy a gift for every year. Create a separate list of everyone you give a card to throughout the year, but do not give a gift. Decide how much you would like to spend on each person. Place a gift amount into your monthly budget based on how many people you have to buy for and how much you plan to spend. Save this amount every month. When you need to purchase a gift, use some of the money you have saved. Make sure to only spend the amount you have allotted per person.
Your gift budget should leave space (and cash!) for unexpected gifts. Unexpected gifts that need to be worked into your gift budget may be for graduations, baby gifts, wedding gifts, or gifts for new friends made during the year.
Also never forget one thing when planning on gifts for people. Homemade treats! We often make a whole bunch of chocolate chip cookies for people. Not really because we want to think of us as “cheap” or anything, but because truly most of us have “everything we need” anyway. We just don’t know what to buy for people. So we give away a tin of cookies. The total cost is about $2 for the tin, and $2 for the cookie ingredients.
money saving mom – this is a great idea as well! We have done something similar before though no one does it for us as we have too many food allergies!
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