Revising Our Christmas Budget

Posted on December 5th, 2008 by DebtAway

We set a budget of $150 for our Christmas shopping this year. Um…yeah. Good intentions, but not going to happen. What happened?

First of all, the gift I am making for my siblings ended up costing a little more than I thought. It’s still not a lot on a per gift basis, but I have a few siblings so it adds up. That added about $20 to the cost.

Next up was the gift for my son’s teacher. We usually get an ornament but I decided to not do that. I started looking at “adopting” a zoo animal in the class’ name. My son thought that was a cool idea so I think we will do that. The minimum to do that is $25. So that’s $20 more than we were planning on spending. BUT, we haven’t chosen a charity yet to give money to at the end of the year, so that gift could count towards that and not technically be a Christmas gift. Hmm…

I always seem to forget too that Santa has to get mom and dad something. Argh. To make matters worse, I was working on a snow fort with my son and my legs were freezing and I said I should ask Santa for snow pants. Kids do not forget. He keeps reminding me to ask Santa for snow pants. So that adds another $50 or so to the total if mom and dad get snow pants. I’ve looked for used so far with no luck. This “could” be considered clothing, though, since my husband and I could really use them since we deal with a lot of snow.

That brings us up to $95 already. What was I thinking? Oh well. I can say one thing, if we didn’t set a budget at all we probably would have spent way more than that already. At least trying to get our spending under that has really made us focus on the gifts and not just buy random things. Our son is only getting a few gifts, but they were well thought out. One thing we know he wants, one thing we know he’ll love, and one thing he will probably like after a while but it will be one of those “toss and keep opening presents” types of gifts at first.

I also didn’t consider stocking stuffers when doing the original budget. I have a habit of forgetting about those. They can add up quickly as I found out one year.

We’ll hopefully finish our shopping this week, so I’ll have to post how we did.