Saving for Christmas Year Round

I come from a pretty big family and I married into an even bigger family, so for a while the Christmas holiday season started to stress us out a bit. One year we tried doing a Secret Santa gift exchange, another year we said we'd only buy gifts for the kids. Needless to say both of these ideas were a flop financially because we still ended up spending more than we had originally intended; there's no way grandma is not getting a gift when she takes care of our little ones M-F, rain, sleet, snow or sickness.

So three years ago we decided to start saving for Christmas at the beginning of the year in an effort to lessen the blow of the cost of gifts, food and holiday shenanigans we'd partake in. As we come close to the end of year 3, I'm so glad we did this.

It's really simple to do, every week on payday we set aside $12 as a priority for the holidays. We take the money out of our general account and put it in an envelope that we are not to touch, unless an emergency comes up of course. At the end of 50 weeks we've effortlessly saved $600. With that we buy gifts to donate to Toys for Tots, gifts for the family, take nice day long trip to NY to see the tree and lots more.

Two years ago we decided to bump it up to $35 a week and plan, not only for Christmas but for our kids birthdays, a fun summer event, and Halloween. 

We started off in January with $13 in the Christmas envelope, $13 in the birthday party envelopes and $9 in the summer fun event envelope and we gave a savings cutoff date for each, except for Christmas, which continues year round. Once one event passed, we moved the money to start saving for the next thing.

Here's the breakdown for the year:
$13/w Christmas (January 4th - December 20th)
$13/w Birthday (January 4th - August 23rd) then move this $ to Halloween
$9/w Summer Fun Event (January 4th - August 2nd) then move this $ to Halloween
$22/w Halloween (October 4th - October 25th)
Once all of the years' events are over we continue to save the $22/w in case of an emergency like when the heater decided to blow out in January

For some people $12 is lunch for 1 day, so bring your lunch one day and set aside that money for the holiday season. Before you know it you'll have a ton of cash and it won't feel stressful spending the mone wwhen it comes time to do your shopping. 

Give it a try it can’t hurt.

Happy Holidays

Niki
 (If you'd like to read more about me visit my post on A Bit About Me).