We budget $35 a month for gifts. Some months we do not need to buy gifts and so the money is saved for big Birthday months (ours are April, June, and July) and Christmas. This gives us a total of $420 we can spend throughout the year.
This does not sound like very much because it's not. I have learned to give homemade gifts from the heart so that they will still fit in the budget, and hopefully they will still be meaningful to the recipient.
Siblings' Birthdays: One of the gifts that I started giving to our brothers and sisters for their Birthdays is a loaf of homemade Ooey Gooey Cinnamon Bread from lilluna.com. This bread is as good as it sounds. I like it even better than the kind from Great Harvest. I wrap it up in Saran Wrap and stick it in a paper bag with a bow. You can smell the bread even through the paper and it is delightful. You can find the recipe here.
The recipe makes 5 loafs so I usually scale it down to two (giving one loaf away and keeping one for ourselves. Shhh!)
Kids' Birthdays: For my little Eli's Birthday, I like to stick to the rule: something they WANT; something they NEED; something to WEAR; something to READ. I personally think that we can get too carried away with kids' Birthdays. I know that we all love our kids and want to give them everything in the world to show them our love. But the thing is, they do not need EVERYTHING they want. If they get everything they want every Birthday or Christmas they will learn to expect everything they want and be dissapointed if one year they do not get it all instead of being grateful for what they did get. That was probably a major run-on sentence but you get what I mean.
Kids' Christmas: For Christmas, I follow the rule above but just double or triple it, depending on the budget that year.
Parents' Birthdays: For both sets of parents, we do something a little more special than bread because they do so much for us. We still do not spend a lot because we can't, but we try to do a little something extra to make their day a special one. The same goes for Christmas.
Spouse Birthdays, Christmas, and Anniversary: For each others' Birthdays and Christmas, we try to keep it at $50 each. For our Anniversary, we usually just go on a nicer-than-usual date.
Whatever it is that you spend on gifts, follow these steps
1. Name an amount that you will spend on each child, parent, grandparent, sibling, ect. for each event. For example: Kids Christmas: $70 each X each child, Kids Birthday: $50 each X each child, Parents' Birthday: $35 X each parent, and so on.
2. Add them all together and that is your total gift money for the year.
3. Divide that amount by 12 and that is what you budget for each month so that when the big day of Christmas rolls around, you will already have the money set aside.
That bread looks divine! I HAVE to make it and soon! We follow similar rules when it comes to gift giving. I also try to buy the kids' gifts throughout the year when there are good deals/clearence and then save it for birthdays and Christmas. It's easy to get carried away so I have to be careful and stick to our budget.
ReplyDeleteLoving this blog of yours!