Here is the easiest way to save an extra $500 before Christmas
Christmas doesn’t sneak up on you. Literally, it’s the same day every single year. But somehow, we all tend to not have the money we want or thought we had to spend gifts on friends and family. Therefore, instead of rushing to find extra means of income in November and December, here is the easiest way to have an extra $500 on Black Friday or at least before Christmas.
How to make a manageable Christmas Budget
At the time I am writing this it’s almost exactly twenty weeks until Black Friday. This means that if I was to save $20 for 20 weeks, I would have $400 to spend when presumably stores put on some of their best sales of the year. Just 4 or so weeks later would mean I had around five hundred dollars if I wanted to do last minute shopping.
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Ok, that’s easy, but is it?
It can be.
If set up in a visual way, it’s a lot easier.
I created some coloring sheets for the whole family so that it was an interactive way to save up money and visually see and track how much we’ve saved in a given amount of time.
I get to color in each line of the tree as it’s been saved. I have even added ornaments before to indicate that we made the decision to not eat out and it saved $75 that I put towards Christmas instead. Or maybe I really wanted a coffee, but I saved the $5 and put it in the Christmas fund.
It starts out fairly low in how much I need to save each week with only $15. Living in Massachusetts where we get bottle deposits back, I could easily take cans and bottles from ourselves and neighbors to the grocery store for 5¢ each and get most of that.
But near the end of saving, it’s more like $30, $40, or $50 for the week. But learning to save along the way, this gets easier. OR, those times I saved some money that I didn’t intend could fill in our tree faster if I didn’t add decorations.
Your kids can join in too. This allows them to not only see you working towards a Christmas budget goal, but they can have their own savings challenge to meet spending goals for each person in the family.
Related: How to teach your kids to be money conscious without being cheap
Once we hit the goal of an extra $500, saving becomes a lot easier. This means we could do a travel budget, birthday budgets, or other unique ways of saving money.
Get the free Christmas Budget Printables
If you can’t commit to $500 or don’t have 5 months to save, we have other budget coloring sheets. One is for 6 weeks of saving, another if for $200 and includes a couple fo saving challenges, and another is open ended to allow you to budget with the time and money you can commit.
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Kara is an author and advocate for positive, grace-filled parenting. She is homeschooler to her 6 children living on a farm in New England. She believes in creative educational approaches to help kids dive deeper into a rich learning experience and has her degree in Secondary Education & Adolescent Childhood Development. She is passionate about connecting with and helping other parents on their journey to raise awesome kids!
