How To Budget For Christmas Shopping
Whilst most people enjoy Christmas shopping, and the spirit of giving, there are many people for whom this is a time of financial stress. Some people have a large family or group of friends to buy for, or feel they have to buy expensive presents for them. There are ways to deal with this problem, however. One of these ways is to budget carefully leading up to Christmas shopping time, and another is to buy things during the year rather than leaving all your Christmas shopping to be done at the same time.
Before you start creating a budget for your Christmas shopping, make a list of all the people you are going to buy presents for. Remember any employees or co-workers, and others such as your children's teachers or your mail carrier, who you would normally give a gift to, as well as your family and friends. Don't forget any toy drives for charities which you normally contribute to as well.
The next thing is to decide how much you are going to spend, and then divide this amount by the number of gifts you need to buy. Bear in mind that you may not want to spend the same amount on everybody on the list, however, because you might want to get something special for your close friends or family, and this method does not allow for that.
You could also divide your gift giving list into specific categories. These might be close friends and family, acquaintances, people from work, school teachers, charity drive, and so on. Then decide what percentage of your overall budget for Christmas shopping is going to be spend on each category. Having done that you can then divide that amount by the number of people in a category, which gives you the amount you can spend on each person in it.
A third way to organize your Christmas shopping budget is to decide first how much you are going to spend on the people on your list who are the most important, which is most likely to be your close friends and family. This will give a remainder amount which you can then divide up amongst the rest of the people on the list. Either just divide the amount by the number of people, and spend the same on each, or continue to choose the amount for each person until your budget is used up. If there are still people left on the list at this point you will either have to drop some people off the list or make alterations to the amount you are going to spend on some of the others on your Christmas shopping list.