It’s not easy today to shop for holiday or birthday presents when your budget is so tight. Every day you can find promises of good deals, but the truth is that most of these special priced options are limited to the first few customers or that there are only a limited amount. What works better for your budget is limiting your purchases and staying within a set parameter. If the next item on your list is drives you over budget, you simply don’t buy it.
For instance, if you pick up that black sport watch on your list but can’t afford the GPS accessories you were going to get, which do you put back? Keep the affordable one and replace the not so affordable one. That way you can get everyone a gift and not blow the budget on just one or two.
Otherwise you’re just going to end up overspending in an effort to make sure everyone has an equal gift collection under the tree. If you buy transformers for your kid but you’re worried that you need more for your spouse you’re bound to overspend.
We spend so much because we are after a sense of fairness. We often tend to look toward the gifts we have purchased and evaluate them by value. The more we spend on one gift the more we equate the value of it. When you break it down it doesn’t really work like that at all.
We send a message through our gifts. The message has gotten a bit distorted over the years. Gifts are a token of appreciation, acknowledgment, and even symbolic representations of love. But those things can not be measured by the amount of money you spent, only by how well you know the person and can present them with a token that means something.
Make it a family agreement that nobody buys more than one gift or nobody spends more than an agreed amount on anyone. That way you remove the pressure from everyone in the family. There have been fantastic holidays that have been born from spending $5 or less on each person’s present.
Yes, there is a seasonal hardship throughout the nation’s families. Some families will choose to put off paying bills and spend two or three months trying to catch up. Yet other families will volunteer, spend real time together, and come away from the holiday season renewed instead of stressed.
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