Tackling this daily task in the Weekly Household Planner:
Begin Christmas Shopping
Yep, I said it! Every year it seems like I hear more and more people complaining of being completely overwhelmed with Christmas shopping. Especially in these economic times when it seems everyone is on a tighter budget, Christmas shopping has become full of dread for so many. Why not plan ahead and get a jump on it all?
Here are a few steps to get you started and hopefully stretch your family’s budget this year.
Get the Lists
To make your job much easier, encourage your family and friends to create lists. My favorite is the amazon wish list – we’ve used this system to keep our ‘wishes’ up to date for both holiday shopping as well as birthday gifts. Did you know you can add an item from ANY web-site to your amazon list? Yep, check out more on that HERE – this makes keeping a list all in one place extremely easy and efficient. Even if you do not purchase directly from amazon, using these lists are a great source of information and inspiration. (Although I have found that amazon often beats prices in my local store, plus I can ship directly to those who are out of state, relieving me of another duty!) Gift cards are always easy too, especially from amazon.
Set a Budget
You should not start doing any shopping until you’ve taken the time to come up with a budget. After you have a general amount, go through your list of friends and family, allotting an amount to each person. This way you have an idea of where to start when looking for gift ideas. You should NEVER do any shopping without a budget in mind.
Online Christmas shopping
Its never been easier to do your Christmas shopping without having the stress of trekking around the stores and contributing to the frenzied buying habits of the rest of the world. Keep your ear to the ground for discount voucher codes for online stores to make even bigger savings when shopping online. To make the most of your online shopping buck, make sure you check out not only the discount code sites, but ebates, a site which pays you for shopping online! You can often ‘double-dip’ by finding a discount code and then going through ebates to get a percentage of cash back, which they dole out to you four times a year. In three years, I’ve earned over $600 in cash back from shopping I already would have done. Who can beat that? It costs you nothing.
Another site I use is My Points – the same type of cash back site, but they give you points to redeem. I’ve been able to get some wonderful gift cards to restaurants which create a fun evening out for my family which costs us nothing, since I was purchasing items already, but just went though the My Points site.
And I already have mentioned SWAGBUCKS – but for those who have yet to sign up, here is your chance to start earning points to redeem for amazon gift cards! Just do normally searching on the web and earn points which you redeem for gift cards or products. This certainly stretches our holiday shopping budget!
Be Creative
When you begin to gather Christmas gifts early out, you have time to be creative, make homemade gifts and save more money. Plus, when u begin looking for gifts this far ahead, you can shop for experiences that someone would like rather than more stuff! I love using sites like GROUPON, LIVING SOCIAL, SAVEOLOGY, EBAY DAILY DEALS and AMAZON DAILY DEAL to get fun gift ideas that are discounted and unique. One of my favorite gifts from last year was an afternoon tea “date” that my daughter bought for me for Christmas where she and I got to go spend the afternoon together enjoying some yummy treats and tea. Those are the best gifts – experiences!
Are you an early-bird shopper or procrastinator?
