Last year we spent $414.84 on Christmas gifts. The American Research Group reported that the average spending for Christmas in 2015 was $882. That means we spent less than half the average last year. This year, I’ve set a goal to spend just $50 total for Christmas.
(My husband looked at me after reading that last sentence and said, “$50…really!?”, like I’m crazy or something… 🙂 )
One issue with spending less than the average family on Christmas is that the kids pick up on it, especially as they get older. They see their friends receiving gaming systems, computers, tablets and new iPhones. And sometimes they express their disappointment over not having such extravagant gifts on Christmas morning. But I do think they (eventually) come to understand.
Could we afford more expensive gifts? Yes, but it would limit our ability to do other things. Instead of buying expensive gifts, we take vacations (admittedly on a budget), go camping and boating and enjoy various other activities, such as water parks and rock wall climbing. These activities create more lasting memories than a new iPhone ever could.
This year, I’m going into the season more prepared than last year. I love a good challenge, so I’ve set a total budget of $50 out of pocket for all Christmas gifts. Though I don’t believe in excessive gifts, I’m no Scrooge. Nor am I Superwoman.
To accomplish this feat, I’m using my cashback credit card rewards. I have right around $300 in cash back credit card rewards available right now. But, even with the rewards, it will be a challenge to keep my spending under a total of $350.
Anyone want to play along? Even if you don’t have cash back rewards, you could challenge yourself to spend less!
How We Gift
As I was writing this post, I was trying to remember what gifts we gave last year. Honestly, though I can remember a few, I have forgotten most. The gifts I do remember giving? The ones we made ourselves!
We try to make as many homemade, handmade gifts as we can. Last year, we gave our parents a handmade bird feeder, crocheted scarves (for moms and grandma), wooden coasters, and homemade jam. Best of all, they loved these gifts!
This year, we plan to make our parents, grandparents, and our Taekwondo family’s gifts once again (Need ideas? See this post and check out my Pinterest board!).
For some odd reason, teens don’t have as much appreciation for the hand made gifts. Go figure. So, most of the cash back rewards will be used for our teenagers’ gifts, which will be $100 or less each – and from Amazon
Our daughter’s teacher gifts will be a small treat and gift cards purchased with credit card rewards.
In our attempt to simplify over the years, we have whittled down the list of people we give gifts to. Though the grandparents more than make up for our limited gift giving to the kids, we have asked them to cut back on gifts too. Less spending, less shopping = much less stress. Win-win.
What We Do
My husband takes a week off each Winter break and we all hang out with extended family and at home with the kids. I LOVE this time of year. It’s like a staycation – which I love because, unlike a regular vacation, there isn’t the stress of packing and traveling.
During the week, we spontaneously find activities outside of the house, like rock wall climbing, going to movies and going out to eat. We travel to my in-laws for a couple of days (this just costs gas!) and spend time with my family during the week too. The fireplace is often roaring on days spent at home, with lots of popcorn and Redbox or Netflix movies, plus games! We often spend the week mastering our strategies on the new games we received as gifts.
It’s relaxing and simple. It’s about the time spent that counts, not the money. And, it’s positively wonderful!
Community
Giving is an important part of this season for us. People seem to be in a more giving mindset this time of year, so I like to take advantage of that to collect donations for a local shelter. For the past three years, I’ve set up a collection at my daughter’s school and we’ve collected truckloads of needed items for the shelters. Over Winter break, we get a few kids (and parents) from school together and deliver the donations. Last year, we even got to tour the homeless shelter, a great experience for everyone.
Giving to those in need in our community helps my family just as much as it does those we are trying to help. Every year when I’m in my garage sorting donations for the shelter, I’m overwhelmed with emotion at people’s generosity with their donations. The feeling of gratitude is indescribable.
How do you do Christmas? Have you tried to spend less and simplify the holidays? What’s your most memorable gift?
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We do a fair amount of “off balance sheet” giving between Amazon, Ibotta, Swabbucks and credit card rewards. And we do homemade gifts too (but I’m pretty sure I spend more than $50 on the ingredients.) I still record the total of everything spent including the rewards and ingredients/materials, and we end up near the average if not over by a bit.
And, for me, that marks real progress. I think we used to spend about $2K with gift cards, big gifts, etc. I grew up in a big Christmas-giving family, and as we’ve lost my mom and grandparents I tried picking up the slack. I had to deliberately back down., and now our budget’s a lot more reasonable.
Thanks for sharing, Emily! Any way you can “hack” gift spending really helps the bottom line. I really do think it makes a difference how you were raised with holiday gift giving and it’s great you have been able to reign in the costs. In my family, we typically keep the spending/giving to one or two moderate gifts per person. Of course, kids always seem to get the most! 🙂
Our family has a lot of pre-teens (can they already be like this at 9?) so we’ve given up on buying them actual gifts. They’re getting Amazon gift cards, but their mom is wonderful about making them think about their purchases. Last year they all chose to buy roller skates! It’s so much better than the cheap plastic toys.
Once they get to pre-teen age, they are so hard to buy for. When asked what they want, my kids usually reply “I don’t know”. They don’t usually want anything, but they certainly like to have the ability to purchase when they do find something they want. On the other hand, they like to have a couple of gifts to open, so I usually buy them a couple of smaller things for fun.
Love the roller skate idea! One thing about it – I’m glad we’re past the cheap plastic toy stage (but that means we’re more into the expensive electronics stage).
This is awesome! I think water parks and rock wall climbing sound a lot better than some plastic junk. We made a resolution in our family to keep with hand made gifts after things started getting a bit ridiculous.
Memories made from fun activities will last much longer than the latest electronics 🙂
Thanks, Mr. Crazy Kicks! I love creating memories with family and friends (and I love doing fun things, like water parks and climbing!). Though the teenagers won’t always admit it, I know they love the experiences as well. 🙂
My Mom is SET on us exchanging gifts with them, but this is the third year of a phased approach by myself and my siblings to limit the number of gifts we have to buy. First, in our extended family Christmas we moved to a Secret Santa exchange instead of everyone buying gifts for everyone. Second, we cut the number of gifts given between siblings. Finally this year we cut out the sibling gift exchange and will only exchange gifts with my parents. It’s a big improvement over years past where there were so many gifts to buy.
It’s probably good to do a phased approach, especially when Mom wants it to happen! 🙂 We have also stopped the exchange with siblings and now we just exchange with the parents, so we don’t have a ton of gifts to buy. On my side of the family, we are moving toward one very small (we do hand made) gift for each adult.
Sounds like a great plan. I do believe it’s harder to challenge your Christmas budget when you have kids and they see their friends receiving big expensive items. I politely told my son no this year when he asked for a PlayStation 4 and I ended up using some gift cards I’d saved to purchase all his gifts this year so I didn’t have to spend anything on him. I also used a store credit I had to get him a tablet which I know he will enjoy. It sounds like your family is very creative when it comes to Christmas gifts and I believe that is key.
Thanks for stopping by, Chonce! I love the idea of banking the gift cards to pay for gifts! That’s very similar to our approach of banking cash back rewards…I’ve been planning to use them all year. Even though there have been times when I’m tempted to cash them in, I knew I’d be grateful for them come Christmastime.
That’s an amazing budget Amanda! We have five kids between us and a few nieces and nephews on each side. We try to keep it simple but the electronics are really a budget killer (and so are gifts when they buy their own homes!) We will give money “toward” big electronics (or household items – think snowblower!) but rarely buy anything without them having to add money of their own. That keeps them “in the loop” of understanding the costs. My kids have been great about taking care of their electronics too and keeping them for years. Good luck with your plans 😉
Thanks, Vicki! My kids are gifted money from their grandparents, which we have them split between savings and money they can put toward their wants (typically electronics). I may need luck to pull it off! So far, so good, though! 🙂
Wow $350 is impressive! We have scaled back over the years. We set a budget and shop with a list for everyone, not impulse buys or being caught off guard buying something last minute. We take our time, research and find the best deals for the gifts we want.
This is the perfect way to shop for gifts, Brian! It’s so easy to get caught up in impulse buys at this time of the year, but having a list and sticking to it can curb this temptation, for sure. My husband is great at researching to find the best deals too – I hand the larger items over to him and he usually finds a way to save us some money.
I wrote a post similar to this 🙂 The average American shopper spends over 1.5% of their total income on gifts. We decided that we were going to try to spend closer to 1% this year and see how it works out. So we will definitely be doing the challenge with you this year 🙂
Yay! That’s great! I will check out your post too! 🙂
Wow this will be a challenge 🙂 Good luck!
I’m also a fan of taking vacations/experiences over gifts.
I typically spend $300 or so on gifts and most of it is just chocolate 🙂 I’ve learned it’s just easier to give chocolate because most people like it and it’s not so extravagant that they feel they have to reciprocate
Ooooh…$300 worth of chocolate! 🙂 You’re so right – I never thought much about it, but people don’t tend to feel like they are obliged to reciprocate with a gift when the gift they receive is food.
Inspiring post, Amanda! Were trying to keep our spending to $500 this year, $150 for each of our 3 children, and a small buffer : )
Unfortunately I don’t use a cash back rewards card as that would come in handy (we collect travel rewards points instead). We’ll definitely be shopping on Amazon though!
Thanks, MMM! I think a $500 budget for a family of 5 is great! I’ve been banking the credit card rewards for about 10 months. I can appreciate using the cards for travel rewards instead, (we saved $2100 on our vacation last year!).
$2100, that’s fantastic! My son and I are heading to Phoenix in March, to watch some spring training baseball, planning to have travel points cover a significant chunk of that trip. : )
Way to tone down on all the ‘stuff’ that tends to come with the season! And you’re definitely on to something with prioritizing experiences. We’ve really enjoyed spending Christmas cash on zoo/science memberships (http://www.shepicksuppennies.com/best-money-spent-pennies-and-dollars/). Definitely better than more junk around the house!
Thanks, Daniel! Zoo and Science center memberships are great experience purchases, especially when you have younger kids. I love to try out new experiences with the kids – this past summer we snorkeled and went parasailing for the first time, creating more lasting memories.
We have slowly started to phase ourselves out of our big family gift exchanging. Both of us come from big families, and both of our families are big on Christmas. The first few years we were married, we were buying gifts for every one of our siblings (combined, 9 siblings and 4 parents!) Things were just getting too out of control. So we’ve talked our siblings into drawing names each year and that has significantly helped out our Christmas budget.
Wow – you have quite a few siblings! I bet drawing names really helped to cut back on money and stress at Christmas. Glad to hear you’ve been able to implement this to help out with the budget!
Nice work hacking your gift budget. I’m grateful that Toddler BITA still has a deep appreciation for stones, empty boxes and sticks. I’m going to have to start to get more creative the older she gets.
Thanks, Mrs. BITA! I loved it when the kids were still entertained by common objects. My son had his own cupboard at that age with empty containers, pots, pans, and other household objects that he loved even more than the cheap plastic toys.
We switched to donating instead of gifting several years ago. For the holidays, we bring gifts to family that can be shared and consumed. It was too easy to overspend on stuff when everyone’s complaining about having too much stuff!
That’s great, Claudia! I love gifting consumables. I even give the kids food – food I don’t typically buy, so it’s a treat. I think we may be moving toward an almost gift-less Christmas in the next year or two since the kids are getting older.
We spent close to $400 for us and our extended family last Christmas. I think we are somewhere near or slightly below that amount for this year. I have spent more than $50 on my wife this year, but, part of that is tickets to the Christmas symphony that also doubles as a date night.
We also saved money by buying from the gift catalogs of charities. We were going to donate money anyways and this killed two birds with one stone.
That’s a great budget, Josh! I love that you bought your wife symphony tickets – I think gifting experiences is great (especially date night!).
That’s so true about kids picking up things if they see others having expensive gadgets. We live in such a relational society it’s so hard not to compare ourselves to others.
Gotta love cashback rewards! I have about $300 in rewards points as well and I swore I would never use them because I wanted to see how far I could get 10 years down the road but I think I will have to spend everything this holiday season because of a massive cash crunch. Sad day.
Would be a great post to see what you bought with those $350! 🙂
Thanks, FS! I don’t think you should feel too bad about using the cashback rewards for Christmas. It’s not guaranteed they will be there in 10 years anyway!
Great idea on the post. Maybe I’ll do a follow up in January detailing what I purchased and gifted! 🙂
I really like the idea of handmade gifts. I think that I am going to try and do this with my family. Gift buying can get really out of control and I really want to start implementing a better mindset about Christmas. Thanks for the tips. I am definitely going to try it this year and see what happens.
Thanks for the comment! I love giving the handmade gifts…and the recipients tend to like them too. Right now we’re making customized wooden name signs out of scrap wood we already had (like this). It can be a bit time consuming, but it’s worth it, in my opinion.
I had the same reaction as your husband when I first saw that you were spending $50, how is Amanda going to do it?!
Still $350 is not a pretty big sum. Homemade gifts are definitely a fabulous idea and I like how you give back to the community during Christmas! This indeed is the season of giving!
Thank you! So far, I’m on track to come in under budget. It’s easier for me to do since we don’t have too many people to buy for.