How to Create a Christmas Budget — and Stick With It!
Posted By Crystal On November 8, 2012 @ 4:15 pm In Frugal Holidays,LITE Feed (non-deal) Posts | Comments Disabled
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I’m honored to be guest-posting on the What’s In the Bible Blog [1] today on How to Create a Christmas Budget — and Stick With It [1]! Here’s a snippet:
1. Create a Budget
Yes, it’s kind of a no-brainer, but you can’t stick with your Christmas budget if you don’t have a budget in the first place. Sit down this weekend, if at all possible and look at your current expenditures and your income and decide what is a realistic budget amount to set aside for Christmas.
2. Start Saving
The sooner you can start setting aside money for Christmas, the better. Even if all you can manage to squeeze out of your budget is $3 to $5 each paycheck, start setting that aside in a separate fund. Do not allow yourself to touch it for any reason, except to purchase Christmas gifts.
We typically start planning for Christmas spending halfway through the year. Since we use a cash envelope system [2], we just start socking away most of our gift cash for Christmas. In addition, we also save up our Swagbucks Amazon gift cards [3] to use for Christmas presents. And I keep my eyes open for other ways to earn free gift cards or products that would be good for gifting.
photo credit [4]
Article printed from Money Saving Mom®: http://moneysavingmom.com
URL to article: http://moneysavingmom.com/2012/11/how-to-create-a-christmas-budget-and-stick-with-it.html
URLs in this post:
[1] Image: http://whatsinthebible.com/2012/11/07/tricky-bits-of-christmas-how-to-create-a-christmas-budget-and-stick-with-it/
[2] cash envelope system: http://moneysavingmom.com/2009/07/the-envelope-system-experiment-paying-with-cashwe-all-did-it-at-one-point-when-you-are-a-child-and-are-too-young-to.html
[3] Swagbucks Amazon gift cards: http://moneysavingmom.com/2012/10/31-days.html
[4] photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/allerleirau/3131341442/sizes/m/in/photostream/
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