How to Set Limits on Christmas Spending

Video Transcript

"Hello my name's Melissa Schenk and on behalf of Expert Village today we're going to be talking about how to budget for Christmas. In our next step I know this sounds simple but the first thing we need to do, or the second thing we need to do is to make a budget. So we've done our brainstorming, now you want to make a budget. Set limits for yourself. I think this is really where people sometimes tend to go overboard when it comes to holiday spending because you're perhaps buying gifts for people. You've got decorations to buy, you've got food to buy, set limits. Set limits for yourself. You can set either, at this point a general limit, like you've got two hundred dollars to spend, total, or a thousand dollars to spend, or fifteen hundred dollars to spend. But whatever it is that you are going to spend, set a limit for yourself and try not to exceed over that. It's really good practice to be setting those limits so you can set a general limit by saying perhaps I have fifteen hundred dollars to spend on everything. And then if you want from there you can take budget and determine how much you're going to spend on food, how much you're going to spend on travel, how much you're going to spend on gifts. So then you might say for gifts I'm going to spend five hundred dollars. For food I'm going to spend two hundred dollars, and start setting limits as you're beginning to set a budget for your overall holiday spending. "