Share your financial tips for the holiday season!

Coach Natalie

With Christmas fast approaching, we'd love to hear from you on any tips or advice you've picked up over the years on your financial journey! For example, how do you budget for the holidays? Have you learned any hard lessons? Do you have any big wins you want to share? How do things like Black Friday deals impact your ability to spend?

We wish everyone a safe and happy holiday shopping season!

Flopbot

A year ago, I created a separate Saving Account specifically for “Christmas” and any money that finds itself inside this account is automatically dedicated to Christmas spending. Each paycheck, a small position gets deposited automatically. This has certainly made Christmas less stressful and easier to fund.

P.S. I choose to do it this way specifically so I didn’t have to create a Simplifi Savings Goal for the account; didn’t want to do the data entry. I did the same with our B-Day Fund and am loving it.

DannyB

I have a "B-days & Xmas" Savings Goal that is funded monthly, and the real-world funds are set aside in our checking account since this money is used throughout the year and keeping it in our checking account keeps the funds readily available.

Having a Simplifi Savings Goal does two things for me:

1. I am reminded to make a monthly contribution to this fund.
2. I can see in the Simplifi Account list, how much of my checking account funds are set aside for birthday and Christmas spending.

Last year our family set up an account with [online gift exchange service] to help with our holiday gift exchange. Each of us has a profile that includes ideas for gifts. The online service randomly assigns a recipients to each of us and then we had ideas of what to get and who to purchase for. It worked great and was better than the old method of drawing numbers and then randomly picking gifts from the pile.

We used the same service for all our kids kids which greatly reduced the stress of everyone buying ever kid a gift.

Of course grandma still buys a gift or 2 for all the grandkids 🤶

UrsulaA

For the past two years, I gifted my teenage daughters something fun to their liking and a few dollars in Treasury Direct I-bonds. Trying to teach the girls the power of compounding at Christmas.

I need to think of an alternate security gift now that the i-bonds pay less interest.

RobWilk

This particular year, I'm a last-minute shopper (and by shopper, I mean getting Visa gift cards). I still haven't bought them. For my older niece, I need to write a check this year because she has her own "supervised" bank account, the younger niece will get the gift card. My parents say to get them $50 each, but I really wanted to get them at least $100/each. The hard part will be finding my checkbook, and remembering how to write a check.

Besides that, I have an M1 MacBook Air (512GB/16GB) I replaced, but the hard part will be deciding who to give it to, my sister is insisting I need to decide, and on top of that, whoever I pick it's possible they won't even want it, so I might just hook it up to a tv/monitor and make it a desktop to avoid the stress.

I've been trying to put aside money in months where I don't need to spend a lot, so right now in December, my net worth is ~$2500 more than it was in February (And tomorrow is payday), which gives me plenty of breathing room to spend money on holiday spending. I won't spend $2500 on christmas gifts, which means I should end the year up.

ajbopp

I always check with my bank to see what they offer. It's still not an uncommon thing for a bank to offer a "Christmas Club" accout, where you pay $25 a month or so, and the bank makes the 12th payment itself. That's just an example, I'm sure there are lots of variations.

DannyB

@ajbopp my mom participated in her banks Christmas Club every year!

SRC54

Don't spend too much money; it's the thought that counts. Gasoline gift cards are great for Christmas travelers. Save up each Christmas and don't borrow money! I always told my students in Economics (in every course actually) to save to buy big items and only borrow when absolutely necessary.

Merry Christmas everyone!