Christmas money saving tips

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Bah humbug! Who wants to be thinking about money for Christmas? But there are plenty of ways to make minimise your Christmas spending without loosing your festive cheer and making the holiday seem cheap.

Spend wisely

• When you do spend money for Christmas. Make sure you spend it with a credit card that gives you something back. I use airline credit card that gives me air miles.
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Make a gift budget

• Write down everything you buy for each person and how much it costs.
• Buy your gifts early - when things come on sale. In the autumn things often costs less than right before Christmas. Toys for example are much cheaper in the autumn sale.
• Anybody needs books for Christmas? I join no obligation book clubs to get free gifts when joining. Just be sure you can handle cancelling all the monthly books.
• Consider giving your time or skills as gift vouchers instead of bought gifts. Who wouldn't enjoy having a baby sitter, or someone teaching them a skill, a personal shopper or help to fix the computer. Play to your strengths.

Plan your meals

• Make a meal plan for christmas and buy only what you need so things don't go out of date. 
• To spread the costs of groceries, start buying the non periables early, when you do your weekly grocery shop.

Create this Christmas

• Make gifts for the people you love. I promise you they will appreciate it even more than bought gifts, because it shows them you have been spending time and effort on them. Get your kids involved, and they will feel so great when people open their gifts. It's not only about the receiving but also the giving.
• There are lots of free printable wrapping paper and gift tags on Pinterest. 

Baking syndicate

Who has time to make lots of different types of cakes for Christmas? Well not me. So maybe you and your friends could form a baking syndicate? Each one bakes one or two kinds of baked goods, and then you share it between you so you get a wider selection? It also saves money - cause you don't have to buy so many different ingredients.

Secret Santa

Are you buying lots of gifts for a group of people? Secret Santa is a great way to save money and time finding the perfect gift for everyone. There are different ways of doing this, but I have used to put everybody's name in a hat (or there are online generators that do it for you), and then each one draws one name, and that is the person they are buying a gift for. So instead of buying a gift for a random person you can find something you think the person would like. It could be a homemade gift or a bought gift, but set a maximum amount to spend.

Advent calendars

I have said it several times in this blog, but I will repeat it once more. Why not do an activity calendar with the kids instead of buying them an expensive ready made calendar, or buying lots of presents. They will get tired of presents by the time they get to christmas if they get presents each day. I think it is much nicer to spend time together as a family. We do things we normally do before christmas anyway