I saw Christmas decorations when I was shopping today. How much can I afford to spend on Christmas presents?

October 30, 2017

I was out shopping this week and I saw Christmas decorations in a few stores and after I got over being outraged because it's not even Halloween yet, I realized that it's time for me to start doing my Christmas shopping. What is it with stores today? It's still October and they're putting up Christmas decorations? I thought opening on Thanksgiving was bad, but this is terrible!

But enough ranting and back to work. I've already discussed using your paycheck stubs to calculate your monthly budget. Calculating your Christmas budget is also easy to do.

You have been putting money in a special savings account for Christmas shopping, haven't you? You haven't? That's going to limit how much you're able to spend on Christmas shopping which is going to disappoint a lot of people. The first thing you need to do is go to your bank and open a savings account and set up an automatic transfer into it every month for your Christmas shopping. After you do that, then get started on figuring out how much you can spend this year. Look at your disposable income for the month, decide how much you're willing to borrow on top of that, and there you go. You're ready to start your Christmas shopping!

Just be careful! The last thing you want to do is end up putting too much on credit cards! If you do that it will take you years to pay them off. Bite the bullet, cry a little bit, and cut back on your Christmas shopping this year and then next year you'll be able to afford to make up to everyone for small presents this year. It's worth it even though it's not fun.