Planning ahead for Birthdays and Christmas

When it comes to Birthdays and Christmas it’s easy to forget to buy things until a week or so before the event – especially with birthdays – but if you can try and plan ahead then you can make use of the sales and discount codes as they become available through out the year and not just hope there will be one when you need it.

One of the best way’s to do this is to draw up a yearly planner of birthdays and Christmas in table form. This way you can put the names of the people you will need to buy for, and you can allocate colours such as red for ideas, blue for things you’ve bought. You can also document on there what you spend on each person too. Here’s an example of a table of this nature…

2008 Birthday/Christmas Planner

It makes it much easier to remember things too as when you’ve just had a chat with your mum on the phone you can make a note that she’s said she’d really like some new wine glasses, or that your aunty has just re-decorated her lounge in red and gold etc. You can also put down the price you would have spent if you’d bought the item at full price too. This can really help you keep an eye on the savings you’re making, especially if you keep a running total at the end of the table.

Also, having this list available from the year before can help you to avoid making silly mistakes like buying your sister a foot spa two years in a row.

Because this list is there at your finger tips all year round, you can make use of the sales as they come round, and the discount codes on the internet and make some big savings on the presents you buy meaning that you get to buy some really good presents and look really generous to everyone, but without it breaking the bank for you. The other added advantage of doing it this way is that it spreads the cost through out the year meaning that at Christmas not everything is having to come out of one pay packet.

One good way to do it is to set a maximum amount you’d spend per person and apply it as IF you were paying full price. So for this table it might be £75 for mum, dad and sister, and £40 for aunty and best friend. The watch and the golf set between them would have cost £65 if full price had been paid, so they are within the allotted amount, but if I want to add anything else for dad then it would have to cost no more than £10 at full price – i.e. before discount. This actually works out far fairer in terms of what people get than doing it based on the amount you actually spend, which is a particularly good thing if you’re buying for kids.