Learn how to budget for Christmas and start saving months in advance, you can forgo the shock of the season later in the year.
I’ve discovered how to budget for Christmas early and save throughout the year to ensure we don’t have a big surprise in December or January when the credit card bill comes.
How to Budget for Christmas Early
Create a Christmas budget now, no matter the time of year, and start putting away money monthly into a savings account for gifts.
We do this not only for Christmas gifts but also for birthday gifts and other holidays that we know we’ll be buying gifts for.
This way when the event comes up you aren’t stuck wondering where the extra money for gifts is coming from that month. We have our bank account set up to automatically withdraw a certain amount of money each month from checking into the gifts savings account, that way we don’t even have to think about it.
We have a spreadsheet in which we have everyone’s names, birthdays, and holidays for which we buy presents such as Christmas, Birthdays, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, and other holidays.
We decide on an amount we’ll spend on family members and others for each event and enter it into the spreadsheet.
We have each column totaled at the bottom then add up all the columns to come up with what we need for presents for the whole year.
We then divide that by 12, how many months are in the year, and automatically put aside that number into a gifts savings account each month.
If you’re starting later in the year than January then divide the total amount of money needed for all presents by the number of months left before Christmas.
Christmas Budget Google Sheet
If you don’t want to make your own spreadsheet from scratch, I spent hours perfecting one for you to use that I’d love to share with you for a small fee (I give a lot of information away for free but need to make some money to keep my site alive!).
This is a customizable Google Sheet with automatic tabulations that help you stay on track.
The customizable gift budgeting spreadsheet has the following features:
- An overall tab with the budget for the whole year and all occasions that you can customize.
- A sample sheet filled in for a holiday season to show how we use the spreadsheet.
- 5 Customizable sheets/tabs for the next 5 years.
- You can easily plan for more years by duplicating one of the tabs.
- The dollar amounts will calculate as you enter the amount you intend to spend for each person, as well as what you have spent, to then show what you have left to spend for that year.
- If you need to add rows for more people, as long as you add rows in the middle of the spreadsheet the columns will add up correctly at the bottom.
- The age column will automatically update every year based on the birthdate you put in.
Why to Have a Holiday Budget
Having a holiday budget ahead of time is a great way to reduce financial stress and curb excessive holiday spending. The best time of year to start a holiday budget is the new year but it can be started anytime of year that works for you.
To make your holiday budget, you can look at the Christmas spending from last year to give you a good idea of a realistic budget.
By planning your holiday budget you can avoid credit card debt at the end of the year and reduce impulse purchases. Whether you have a tight budget or not, this is a good way to help reach your financial goals overall and reduce financial stress so you can enjoy the festive season more.
Other Holiday Budget Tips
When you plan ahead, you can also think of more thoughtful gifts, find sales on expensive gifts such as Cyber Monday and Black Friday, and still have the best gifts for your gift exchange.
If you’re lucky, the people you are shopping for will have wish lists year round so you don’t have to guess what the perfect gifts are for them!
As I noted earlier, we also budget for birthdays within our holiday budget, so really it’s a year round gift budget I suppose. You can also budget in for teacher gifts whether that’s for the holidays or end of the school year, Christmas cards, wrapping paper, stamps for mailing Christmas cards, and even holiday decorations.
Keep in mind, you also can give handmade gifts and make homemade decorations, they don’t have to all be store-bought presents or decorations.
The Best Laid Plans…
To be fully transparent, we don’t always stay within budget. Sometimes we’re under but more often we’re over budget. We try to not go more than $10 over budget per person per holiday because we don’t want it to get out of hand. If we find we’re going over budget a lot then we look at the budget again and adjust our savings amount.
We also make sure that if we go over budget, we only reimburse ourselves from the gifts savings account for the amount we were supposed to spend, not what we actually spent. That way we won’t end up with a negative balance in the gifts account if we keep overspending.
This budget is just one spreadsheet of a multi-tab spreadsheet that we use to budget our lives. We have a monthly budget, dreams budget, budgets whenever we have considered a job change, a move, etc. It’s not that we don’t have money, it’s that we want to ensure we are spending within our means and also have enough left over for savings and college funds every month. This allows us to live comfortably and not worry about money.
Throughout my parenting journey with 3 kids on a single income, I have become an expert in living comfortably within our means without feeling restricted and I will help you do the same.
I'm a former school psychologist who left my career to stay home with my children, hence the one-income family and needing to adapt to that mentality while still living comfortably.