Saving for Christmas

Originally posted May 25, 2010
This picture does not fully represent my childhood Christmases--you can still see the base of the tree, but it does show off my beloved Spice. Anyway, Christmas at my house was BIG; there were 5 girls, plus mom, and my step dad. When I was in first grade the teacher told us there was no Santa. Of course I went home to confirm with my sister who was not even in school yet--my mom was mad at that teacher! I said it could not be true because mom would never spend that much on toys!

As we got older, Mom would buy things we had been eyeing for awhile, or surprise us with a piece of jewelry, or give us something we didn't know we needed (one year we were all gifted with a tape dispenser since mom was tired of us taking hers--I still have mine). Mom continues to do Christmas BIG and the family is growing! Mom never went into debt for Christmas. For her, it was shopping the sales, shopping the sales, and shopping more sales.

I want to have big, eye-popping Christmases for my kids; on the other hand, my husband had a very different experience and BIG was not part of his Christmas. When we took Financial Peace University last fall, with Christmas fast approaching, the class was left with the question--how much to spend on Christmas? Dave Ramsey gives guidelines (percentages) for every other category, but not gifts. A classmate was watching a morning news show and their financial adviser suggested 1.5% of your income for Christmas. Well, we did not and do not have $600 for Christmas. We took the 1.5% for a gift budget and applied it to yearly gift giving. $50 a month, which has been accumulating. This year, aside from birthdays,various holidays, and our anniversary, we have two weddings to attend. Well, I'm still not sure what gift professor will give his friends; for my sister, I will be making her wedding cake (and traveling 3,000 miles with the kids--that's gift enough!).

Back to saving for Christmas (and other gift giving occasions), I use Swagbucks. My goal is a minimum of 20 Swag Bucks a day. After every 450 Swag Bucks, I redeem for a $5 Amazon gift card. What can you do with $5? Build them up. Amazon allows many gift card codes to be entered; unlike Target, which limits you to 4. Last Christmas I spent the few gift cards I had, plus money from the gift giving budget, and always bought $25 to receive free shipping. I even bought a couple things right after Christmas and put them away for Easter!

If you start today with Swagbucks and earn 20 bucks a day, you will have 3,600 bucks by Christmas. That's 8 $5 gift cards for searching. I search for "yahoo mail" every morning and I am surprised how often that earns some bucks. Also, when I am searching, I go to the other pages--you can get bucks for looking at the other pages, or comparison shopping, or images, etc. You will not get swagbucks for every search, but use it as you normally use a search engine and you WILL see the bucks accumulate! I currently have 8 $5 Amazon gift cards ready to go. I did use some last month, and money from the kids' allowance budget, buying diaper liners and books for the kids. You need to know gift cards are posted around the 1st and 17th each month after you request them.

Disclosure: The link to Swagbucks is my referral link--I get nothing if you sign up, but I do earn matching bucks when you get bucks searching, up to 1,000 per referral.