4 Principles For Saving Smartly During The Holidays

The holiday season is such an exciting time!

For most this means cookies, cakes, and pies, amazing meals with family and friends, time off work to celebrate, and of course presents!

Little miss has just recently discovered how amazing presents are because of our non-traditional advent calendar.

Maybe you’ve seen it floating around on Facebook, but that principle is that instead of chocolates, or an ornament each day, we’re doing 25 days of books, all wrapped up for her to open one each day!

These books aren’t new – we actually just wrapped up 25 books that were already on her bookshelf – but her excitement at opening a present each day is amazing to watch!

Come Christmas, she might think that the only thing that lies behind the wrapping paper on her gifts are books, but that’s ok with me, because everyone knows how important it is to teach your children to love reading!

The 25 Days of Books tradition is one that we started with out daughter becuase we wanted to take the emphasis off of receiving presents and spending money.  Instead, we wanted to move the focus towards spending quality time with family, making memories, and giving of our time and talents not just during the holidays, but year round.

As she gets older, we’ll teach her the principles we’ve decided to abide by for Christmas, but for now, I’m sharing them with you, so that Christmas can stay on budget and on topic for my family and yours!

Kids Won’t Remember The Gifts.  They Will Remember You

We’ve been adhering to this cute little saying that I found a couple of year ago when it comes to gifts:

“One Thing They Want

One Things They Need

One Thing to Wear

One Thing to Read.”

I’m all for giving presents – frivolous presents, even – but there is nothing wrong with giving kids gifts that are practical, or that will stir up a love of reading, which will benefit them much futher down the road.

In 10 years, possibly even by next Christmas, your kids will have forgotten what gifts you got them.

What they will remember is how they felt, if you had meaningful traditions, and if you spent quality time with them.

It’s ok to scale back on gifts – that doesn’t mean you love them any less.

A Strict Budget is Ok

Spending thousands on Christmas doesn’t equal love, and therefore, by extension, setting a budget for Christmas gifts doesn’t mean that you love your kids less.

Your kids will never know (or care) what exactly you paid for gifts, so if your budget is running tight, it is better to buy one great gift that they will use for years, then to blow it on a gift that they thought they “had to have” but will forget about after a week or two.

Or, you might be in that delightful stage where the kids are more interested in the boxes the gifts came in than the gifts themselves, so remind yourself of that when setting a budget and shopping.

Save Year Round

By far the best way I’ve found to save smartly during Christmas is to actually save year round.

Personally, I love having savings accounts for tons of different categories through Capital One 360’s flexible savings accounts, which have no fees, no minimums, and great interest rates.  I use the Automatic Saving Plan to save in each of our holiday savings categories every month:

• Matt’s Gifts
• Gretchen’s Gifts
• Jessica’s Gifts
• Family Gifts
• Holiday Travel
• Holiday Meal

Then, I use the “My Savings Goals” tool to track my progress and stay motivated to save consistently year round as well as any “found” money.

Money builds up  year round, so we can shop year round an stick to that strict budget!

Shop Year Round

The best way to save and spend smartly during Christmas is to ….. not.

That’s right, the best way is to snap up the best deals year round as you happen upon them.

Keep a running list of wants/needs and if something on that list pops up at an unbeatable price, then you’ll have a slush fund of money to use for Christmas presents.

You can spend this money without feeling guilty or taking from another budget line because it is already there, ready and waiting, allocated for Christmas gifts.

Christmas doesn’t have to be a budget buster.

We firmly believe in giving, especially to friends and family during the holidays, but in order to reach our financial goals, we have to do so on a budget, which is why I love using Capital One 360’s savings accounts year round to use Christmas as an opportunity to save smartly!

I was selected for this opportunity as a member of Clever Girls and the content and opinions expressed here are all my own.

Gretchen 

*This post may contain affiliate links.  See my disclosures for more information.

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