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by Tricia

I received some money for a gift for Christmas and decided to spend it on snow pants for myself and my husband. I ended up finding a great deal at Dick’s Sporting Goods and even found a coupon by searching the internet. They ended up being $42 bucks for both pairs. Not a bad deal, and they didn’t bust the budget after all.

My son, though. He is such a sweetheart. He was given an allowance of $10 to get a gift for mom and dad (which were gift cards from a while ago I had been saving). When it was his turn to go into the store with dad, he told me he knew exactly what he was getting. I found out from my husband that what he really wanted to get me was a pair of snow pants, but couldn’t. One, the store didn’t have any. Two, he didn’t have enough money. But the thought means a lot to me.

I’m not sure what he ended up buying. It’s wrapped an under the tree. I know what he got his dad, and I have to say that my son has picked up my tendency to purchase practical gifts. I can’t say any more or I’ll ruin my husband’s surprise 🙂

I did end up getting a gift card for my son’s teacher. While I liked the animal “adoption” idea, I was concerned that it wouldn’t make it to us in time. I may still do it as our end of year donation to a charity. I’m still trying to decide who we should support this year. Hopefully sometime soon we will be in a better position financially where we can start giving more and helping more organizations.

We still have a few more people to buy for. So far, we aren’t as far over our budget as I thought we might be. Alas, there are still 10 days before Christmas so I’m going to wait until then before doing the final tally.

by Tricia

We set a budget of $150 for our Christmas shopping this year. Um…yeah. Good intentions, but not going to happen. What happened?

First of all, the gift I am making for my siblings ended up costing a little more than I thought. It’s still not a lot on a per gift basis, but I have a few siblings so it adds up. That added about $20 to the cost.

Next up was the gift for my son’s teacher. We usually get an ornament but I decided to not do that. I started looking at “adopting” a zoo animal in the class’ name. My son thought that was a cool idea so I think we will do that. The minimum to do that is $25. So that’s $20 more than we were planning on spending. BUT, we haven’t chosen a charity yet to give money to at the end of the year, so that gift could count towards that and not technically be a Christmas gift. Hmm…

I always seem to forget too that Santa has to get mom and dad something. Argh. To make matters worse, I was working on a snow fort with my son and my legs were freezing and I said I should ask Santa for snow pants. Kids do not forget. He keeps reminding me to ask Santa for snow pants. So that adds another $50 or so to the total if mom and dad get snow pants. I’ve looked for used so far with no luck. This “could” be considered clothing, though, since my husband and I could really use them since we deal with a lot of snow.

That brings us up to $95 already. What was I thinking? Oh well. I can say one thing, if we didn’t set a budget at all we probably would have spent way more than that already. At least trying to get our spending under that has really made us focus on the gifts and not just buy random things. Our son is only getting a few gifts, but they were well thought out. One thing we know he wants, one thing we know he’ll love, and one thing he will probably like after a while but it will be one of those “toss and keep opening presents” types of gifts at first.

I also didn’t consider stocking stuffers when doing the original budget. I have a habit of forgetting about those. They can add up quickly as I found out one year.

We’ll hopefully finish our shopping this week, so I’ll have to post how we did.