Some Cost-Savings Tips for Christmas Gifts
Everybody likes getting gifts, and most people like giving them as well (c’mon, admit it, don’t you love it when you have that perfect gift for someone…for me, it doesn’t happen too often but when I have that awesome gift, I’m practically more excited for them to open it then they are!) Of course, buying gifts for the people you care about takes time and money, both of which are finite resources. The best way to allocate your time is to get started Christmas shopping early. Funny, starting early the best way to get good gifts without spending a ton of money as well…but it’s way too late for that now! A good way to have the money for your Christmas gifts is to set a budget and save up for it throughout the year (but it’s way too late for that now too!) Ok, so maybe you didn’t do that this year (we did…sorta - we started saving in September after paying off my wife’s student loans). If you did not, make sure you set it up for next year (heck, go ahead and do it now even if you don’t schedule your automatic transfers to start until January or February).
Now, if you don’t have a big stash of cash saved up for gifts, I’d like to suggest some ways to show you care for your friends and family without going into debt.
1. Do a Gift Exchange
Instead of everyone in your family buying for everyone else, pick names and have each person buy gift(s) for only one other person. We’ve done this on my wife’s side of the family for a few years and I think it really works out well. Instead of having to stress over the time, effort, and money to buy everyone gifts, you can focus your time and money on getting a really good gift for one person. As a result, each person gets some good gifts and everyone saves money.
2. Make a game out of it
On my side of the family, we’ve done a "gift game" for a number of years. The basic idea is that each person brings a gift to put into the game (when we do it, each family contributes three gifts). There are variations to how it is played, of course. My mom usually hands out a number of little slips of paper with different numbers on them and then draws numbers from a hat (bingo style!). When your number is called, you can pick a gift from the pile or take one from someone else. When you are out of numbers, the gift you have is the one you keep. It is not as personal as doing a gift exchange, but it is a way to save money and have a little fun.
3. Do an ornament exchange or card exchange or <insert item here> exchange
Instead of gifts, decide beforehand that everyone will be exchanging some item like ornaments. You can then try to find some meaningful ornaments for each other. Everyone saves some money while at the same time getting a gift that adds to their Christmas decorations. Maybe the ornament idea wouldn’t work very well if you have a uniformly decorated like my parents. (My parents literally took home the display model tree with the lights and ornaments already on it - man, talk about convenience setting it up each year!). If not, try to get each other some really cool Christmas cards. You should be able to get some really fancy cards without spending as much money as on small gifts.
3b. A Photo-Exchange
My wife’s family also does a photo exchange with their extended family (My wife’s maternal aunts, uncles, and cousins). Someone agrees to be the point-person and buys (and maybe decorates) small albums that are provided to each family. We typically get the really inexpensive albums where you just slide the pictures into the plastic sleeves. Everyone then sends out a picture of each person in his/her immediate family to everyone else in the family. I think this is a really neat and inexpensive way to keep up to date with the extended family. We’ve done it for a few years now and it is fun to look back at some of the earliest pictures. (As a side note, my 19-month old loves grabbing the albums and sitting down on her little chair and paging through them. It is hilarious to see even though, as you might imagine, she has destroyed most of the albums).
4. Create Homemade gifts
A great way to give unique, useful and/or enjoyable gifts that show people you care about them without spending a ton of money is to create your gifts. Food is always a good bet: create a pancake mix kit, roast up some almonds, bake some cookies (always a big hit), cupcakes, or brownies, make some buckeyes (yummy - if you don’t know what a buckeye is, you gotta find out - I was turned on to them by my wife when we first started dating. She’s from Ohio, so I’m sure they’re called something else in other parts of the country/world).
You’re only limited by your imagination here. Be creative and make it fun - you’ll save money while simultaneously creating an out-of-the-ordinary gift. This can be extend to all kinds of areas beyond just food. Create small gift baskets of lotions, bath salts (not sure what that is…my wife gave me the suggestion), etc. Create a small personalized picture album. Buy a plain photo frame and paint it or decorate it. Again, the options are endless!
5. Save on shipping
I like buying gifts even though I don’t like spending lots and lots of money. I do, however, get really annoyed at having to pay exorbitant shipping fees to get the gifts to out of town friends/relatives. (I’m spending almost as much on shipping as I did on the gift - what a waste!) So, if you do end up buying gifts for people out of town, here are some tips for saving money on shipping.
Take advantage of free shipping offers
Obviously, there are numerous retailers that will provide free shipping on certain orders. This is a great place to start…but don’t get carried away. Remember that the point of this exercise is to save money…it doesn’t help to get free shipping if you have to buy more than you wanted to or if the cost of the item is more expensive than getting it somewhere else even if you do have to pay shipping. Check out sites like FreeShipping.org to see the different retailers that offer free shipping deals. ChristianPF provides some other tips on saving money while doing your Christmas shopping .
Shop and ship early to avoid crazy shipping costs
Another obvious way to save money is to shop early and use lower cost shipping options. So, that means, get out there and get your shopping done…today! It is getting late, but you still have some time, depending on where you are shipping, to ship your packages at lower rates. If you wait too long, you will be shocked by how expensive it will be to ship your packages 2-day air of (gasp!) overnight!
How about a gift-buying exchange
Instead of buying presents and shipping them to a friend while he/she buys gifts and ships them to your family, try a gift-buying exchange. Decide what you want to get for your friend’s family while he/she (he/she is so onerous….let’s just pick "she" for this section) decides what to get for yours. Then exchange lists and you do her shopping and wrapping while she does yours. My wife has done this a bit in her family and it certainly saves on shipping. If you choose to do this, be considerate. Don’t just tell them to "buy something nice." Instead, tell them exactly what you want to buy and where to find it. Of course, it isn’t much fun to say, "go buy yourself a new sweater." So, still shop and ship your friend’s gift but exchanging the purchasing for everyone else in your respective families should save a bunch of money in shipping costs.
6. Skip the gifts and apply the money to a reunion later in the year
For those families that can’t be together but would like to be together, you could try skipping the gifts (or cutting down on them) and agreeing to save that money to create a vacation where you can get together later in the year. Maybe not as fun at Christmas time…but I’m sure that a vacation together would be even more fun that opening some gifts from far-off friends at Christmas. Memories make really good gifts.
Hopefully this post has provided some good ideas or inspired you to create your own. If you have some great ideas, please share with us!
Here are some more tips on this topic from ChristianPF and BibleMoneyMatters and some tips for being prepared for next year from Gather Little By Little .
Photo Credits: futureshape and Pink Sherbet Photographyand jlz
Intelligently Frugal: Sweat the (Right) Small Stuff
I would venture to guess that most of the people reading this post are interested in being responsible with their money and planning intelligently for their future. And I’m sure we all understand the basics of how to save and plan for the future. The best way to increase the amount of money you have to save, of course, (real basic stuff here) is to either increase the amount of money you have coming in or decrease the amount you spend every month. Let’s focus on the latter for this post – what can we do to decrease the amount of money that is unnecessarily spent each month.
Keep more of your money…
So, you’ve decided to undertake the exercise of decreasing your monthly expenses. The first step is to keep track of all your expenses for a month or two or three and then analyze them to determine where to trim the fat. The entire budget (or as it must be named in our house: the spending plan) conversation is the topic of another post.
In this post, I want to focus on a single important facet of the overall strategy. After you have a listing of all your expenses, the most natural next step would be to find the ones that are the largest expense that can be eliminated or reduced. I mean, why bother eliminating a $2 expense when you can focus on a larger expense and make a much bigger dent in your spending plan? This matches up with the proverbial saying, “don’t sweat the small stuff.”
Do sweat the small stuff…
The problem here is that I am actually going to tell you to sweat the small stuff – well, with a caveat. I am going to suggest that you sweat the “right” small stuff. Sure, a $2 savings is not significant and won’t make a big difference….well, it won’t make a big difference, that is, unless you can cut out that $2 expense every day or even twice a day for most of the month. Making a large sacrifice to trim $20 from your monthly expenses is a good step, but if you can make a tiny sacrifice of $2 and repeat that sacrifice everyday, you’ve actually saved three times as much as the large sacrifice.
There are many, many ways that this can be accomplished and obviously the exact steps to take depend on your personal situation. Some examples include installing a programmable thermostat (and setting it!), installing CFLs, taking your lunch to work, eliminating your daily gourmet coffee, and so on and so forth.
Optimize your frugality…
My goal in this post is not to tell you exactly how to save the money. Instead it is to inspire you to think about your frugal choices in a different light. Maybe eliminating small, repeated expenses will create a bigger savings at the end of the month compared to focusing on one large expense that might be harder to completely eliminate.
Warning: I’m wandering off-topic again…
I would suggest that this technique also works for time efficiency as well. If you want to become more efficient with your time, don’t necessarily focus first on the biggest consumers of time, but rather on the repeated activities. Again, reducing only 2 minutes from an activity that is repeated 20 times a day will save you 40 minutes!
My lovely wife and I talk about this concept often. She is a physician who sometimes sees 25 or more patients in a day. If she can cut out even a few minutes of non-productive work from each encounter, she can spend more time actually interacting with patients and still complete her day sooner.
Life Lessons from Software Engineering…
This is a basic software development concept, actually. When you are tasked with writing or optimizing some software, you are careful to consider what you put into the loops that are repeated over and over again. You’ll want to move all non-essential steps out of those loops. In that way, you’ll do certain steps only once instead of over and over again and you’ll increase the efficiency of your program.
For those of you who do tasks repeatedly during your day, optimizing the time it takes to complete the task could end up saving you a bundle of time!
Eight and a Half Effective but Somewhat Less than Practical Ways to Save Money
Saving money is obviously a key component to any successful personal finance plan. You simply must avoid wasteful spending (or some of it at least) if you want to be able to spend less money than you earn. Well, I’ve been brainstorming…and I’ve come up with some methods to save a lot of money. Have a look…
- Live in your office - Why bother with expensive housing that is a distance from your workplace? If you do that, then you just have to drive to and from your office each day (or whenever you choose to go to work). Instead, just live in your office…you can cut down on housing and transportation expenses and love the environment at the same time - A win-win-win!! (well, I guess it is a lose for the cleaning person who has to step over your sleeping body while cleaning the office). Note - this works best if you don’t have a family and are in grad school. And it works really well if you actually have an office.
- Build a big shed, then sell your house - Our house has a generously sized shed out back. I’m sure I could live in it if I put in some electricity and maybe some running water. If you do this, make sure you build the shed close enough to your house so you can continue to get wifi from your (old) house. If living in a shed and selling your house sounds sounds too drastic, then try just renting your house out.
- Optimize your bathing schedule - Bathing is expensive and probably bad for the environment as well. You waste a bunch of water and loads of soap and shampoo and conditioner rinse down the drain each day. Instead of that tired and outdated routine, start off each day with a quick dip in the local pool. Your wallet and the environment will thank you (Note, it is unlikely that your office mates will thank you)
- Only drive downhill - It seems like your car has to work much harder when driving uphill. So, be smart about your route and only drive downhill. This will reduce the wear and tear on your car while saving you lots of money and reducing America’s dependence on foreign oil (and think of all the interesting places you’ll see that you haven’t explored before!).
- Institute no-heat Wednesdays or no A/C Mondays - Pick the day of the week you hate the most (it’s already the worst day, so it can’t get much worse) and turn off your heat or A/C all day long. Sure, you might get a little toasty or chilly, but think of the cost savings! Doing this each week will add up to big savings while simultaneously strengthening your self-discipline. As an added bonus, you just might find yourself spending more time with friends on these days (at their house, of course)
- No Electricity Tuesdays - While you’re at it, why not go all the way and shut off all your electricity wasters for the day. Turn them all off and reap some serious cost savings. When it gets dark at night, just go to bed. (You might want to try a battery powered alarm clock on these days)
- Cheap entertainment: Eavesdropping on the neighbors - Why bother with expensive movies or cable TV, just walk around (very closely to) your neighbors’ houses and peek in a few windows. I can almost guarantee you that this will be more entertaining that watching narcissistic overpaid actors pretend that they’re real people. (Note-check local laws before actually doing this)
- Walk everywhere - You’ll be doing this once you get to the lowest point in your city anyway, since you’re only driving downhill now, so why not just skip straight to it. Walking is great exercise and though it may take you a long time to get anywhere, think of how great you body will be feeling (except for the extreme ankle and knee pain)! And since you’re living in your office anyway, if you’ve chosen your job wisely you’ll already be at work and in close proximity of all your necessities like restaurants and a local pool!
Well, there you have it. Some ways you can save a lot of money! Implement some or all of these and you’ll be increasing that gap between your income and expenses by leaps and bounds (until they lock you away and you lose your job…but hey, look at that - that’s another way to get free housing!!)
Photo Credits: timparkinson-
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