In our house we have a few things that we’re trying to do to help manage Christmas’ big expenses and turn them into moderate and or tiny expenses.  As the title implies you’ll want to plan ahead for Christmas expenses, holiday travel expenses and of course stay away from credit cards where the bills come later after the kids have played with the empty boxes and wrapping paper and left the toys for the dog to chew up.

• Make a set budget for the amount of money you’re going to spend
• Make a list of people you’re going to give gifts to
• Make a list of gifts for those people (we usually allot money per person and then try to spend under that amount on a specific item)
• Talk to certain relatives and friends about not exchanging gifts except for the kids [if you have them], but instead plan on some time together before or after the ‘mad rush’.
• Buy gift cards when you know that people won’t mind or when you’re not sure what to give.  This reduces the expense of shipping huge amounts of packages to different destinations
• Attempt to spend less than the amount you planned by shopping sales

We try to not let gifts be the part of Christmas that we look forward to and instead think of the gift of Christ and the time that we have together as the important part.  Oh, and most items my sister makes for food - we definitely look forward to those things.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 17th, 2007 at 12:00 pm and is filed under General, Money Management, Taboo & Money (religion, sex, and politics), Tips'n'Tricks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. No tag for this post.