What are you going to do this year to prepare for the cost of Christmas?
1. Started Christmas Club at bank with a deposit from December paycheck.
2. DH and I are saving our change.
3. DH and I are saving any $5 bills we get from change - up to a pre-set amount.
4. Started putting money on a Wal-mart card for food and Black Friday purchases.
Christmas Club at another bank which is for real estate taxes.
Then I take $20 from each pay (6 a month) and put for Christmas to have the cash in case we find something and $5 from each pay to put towards gift cards at Krogers, Wal-Mart or Aldis for food and the ingredients for cookies/candies. Some years we have had to use this cash for tires or such.
Hoping this year to continue buying thru out the year and we are going to cut down next year so.....
We also save change and if I ever have alittle extra I will fold bills really small to put in with it so I don't see them and will forget they are there until taking it in.
Will see how all goes! Rarely does the Christmas Club money go on Christmas stuff but nice to have it for other stuff. I do the 3 kids a Christmas club from my check and they get that check in their stocking.
We save change but we didn't use it this year because it's such a pain to cash in. LOL What's funny is that we've planned for everything else except Christmas. We made each of the kids their own savings account to save their money in, we have a savings account, DH started putting money straight from his paycheck into a Thrift Savings Plan through the Army (starts this month) and he wants both of us to also get an allowance every week to save for ourselves. However, nowhere in there did we plan to put anything aside for Christmas. I mentioned it and he said he didn't think we needed to. We don't normally struggle with anything but it would be nice to save it anyway especially for that. We'll see how much we have left every month after all this other saving going on and maybe i'll start doing it on my own.
I started our Christmas Saving Club a little late this year. I did pretty good with Christmas shopping little by little and didn't need the savings so we put it towards a new stove instead. Worked out well for us.
Not a problem with stepping on toes with me. I'm all for it! lol Thanks
I think I'm going to try the gift card method...Buy one a gift card a month or something like that. I don't know that it will work, but I'm going to give it a shot.
We have a Christmas club where $50 a fortnight gets deposited. We have done this for years and although we do ok for Christmas it enabled us to buy the kids school uniforms etc for back to school in January.
Now that the kids have finished school we use the money to either buy something fairly large for the family or to tidy up any bills that there may be. It is nice to have the back up.
the gift card ideas are good also. WE don't give a lot of GC but do use them for the cousin white elephant some. That would help.
I am thinking of printing out the 52 week saving and then we can pay out of order and mark it down. if there is a time we can afford more we will pay ahead to give us a credit.
I talked to DH about Aggy's saving plan and we are going to do that. I like the idea of gift cards too because, I have a really hard time spending gift cards (don't ask me why - I have no idea!) so I know I will not use them ahead of time! Then I can use them to buy gifts at the places we normally shop. Interesting.
We are also starting a Christmas account at the bank. This was a tight year for us so I don't want to be in that position next year.
I did several GCs for Christmas last year. Just check before you buy them because some start deducting money after a certain amount of time of their not being used. If you buy them way ahead, they may lose some value.
I am loving all the ideas everyone is posting. I love the money put away each week schedule!
I was looking at Aggy's plan again and thought it would work for us in reverse.
Put the larger amount in now and reduce the amount as the year went on so that around Christmas when thing were tight you only had to put in the smaller amount. I am notbsurevwhich way we may go