What's your annual budget for gifts?
dimestorediamond
Forumite 202 Posts
Hi everyone.
Been doing a lot of cutting back and analysing my spending the last couple of months and the one area I find hard to pin down is gifting. All areas - birthdays, Christmas, weddings, births, even those little treats like Easter Eggs or flowers for a sick relative.
Do you have a set annual budget? Monthly? Per gift?
Trying to figure out a long term goal of cutting down gift spending (I am known for generous gifting but I can't keep doing it!), combined with thoughtful items.
Just looking to hear other people's thoughts to see how I can go about managing this.
Been doing a lot of cutting back and analysing my spending the last couple of months and the one area I find hard to pin down is gifting. All areas - birthdays, Christmas, weddings, births, even those little treats like Easter Eggs or flowers for a sick relative.
Do you have a set annual budget? Monthly? Per gift?
Trying to figure out a long term goal of cutting down gift spending (I am known for generous gifting but I can't keep doing it!), combined with thoughtful items.
Just looking to hear other people's thoughts to see how I can go about managing this.
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Therefore for adult birthdays we have an agreed budget of £20 per person. So on my birthday I will be given £20 from my sister, £20 from her husband, £20 from my brother, £20 from my SIL etc., and I give them the same when it is their birthdays.
We do a secret santa for the adults for Christmas, and the budget for that is £50 per person.
For birthdays and Christmas for children it is £15 per person for each occasion.
We only give actual gifts if we know what the person would like - nothing worse than spending hard earned money on something that gathers dust in the back of the cupboard! - otherwise we tend to give cash or vouchers so the person can pool their money and buy something really nice that they would like. For example from my Christmas money I bought myself a really nice bag for work. I doubt that the person who got me as their secret santa would have chosen a colour and style I would have liked, so it was better in this instance for me to choose the bag myself.
For Easter I buy one large egg per child. Tesco recently had them on offer for £2. So I bought those.
I don't set a budget as such for my mum, its more about what she would like, whether that's £10 or £100 (birthday, Christmas or mothers day).
Christmas has £20 per person for nieces, nephews, little brother (as hes 15 and has no children), dad and stepdad. don't buy brother and sister at Christmas.
no budget again for my mum and his mum and dad, just what they'd like.
this is the general rule which we all stick to. ie (older) brother and sister spend the same on my family etc.
easter we just buy for our kids, usually just an egg and new pjs
I worked out all the presents I buy throughout the year, and added £200 for extra's (Weddings, Christening, new houses, retirement, special birthdays etc)
£400 of the budget is for Christmas.
£100 for parents
£100 for husband
£50 is for friends
£50 is for non present stuff - new decorations etc
£30 is for brother
£20 is for Brother's Birthday (Xmas Eve - so included in Xmas)
£50 Contingency
Other events budgets for are wedding anniversary, Parents Birthdays, Mothers Day, Fathers Day, valentines day, wedding anniversary