Separating Christmas Gift Spending & Holiday Spending

Video Transcript

"Hello my name is Melissa Schenk and on behalf of Expert Village today we're going to be talking about how to budget for Christmas. In this clip let's talk about making that holiday spending worksheet. So in this case I've just made it for a gift holiday spending worksheet. But in the earlier segments we were talking about all of those different headers that you can have for yourself. So like food, and decorations, and clothing, and travel, and such, this is just one for gifts. You can have separate worksheets for each of those topics, or you can have one great big worksheet that you work off of as well. So to make it easy for you right now we're just going to focus on a holiday gift spending worksheet. So here, of course I've made this a little bit extra large for you to look at, but we've written down a couple of different headers here. We've got of course the names of the people that we want to buy for. We're going to jot down some gift ideas, the amount of money that we're going to be budgeting for each of these people, and then once we go and do some of our Christmas and holiday shopping we'll have our actual spending, and then the amount that we spent over or under to compensate for that. So, really simply if you get yourself some graph paper and you graph it out, many programs on computers, you know, Excel, you can make your own graphs for this sort of thing. It makes it very very simple but it's good to keep track. This is where so many people forget and go overboard and splurge because you're not tracking your spending. If you budget and you stay within those means, some people you can go over, and some people you can go under, depending on those gifts, depending on sales that are out there. So for instance, for your mother, you budgeted a hundred dollars but we spent a hundred and twenty dollars, so we're twenty dollars over budget. For your father though, you only spent ninety-five dollars, so we're five dollars under budget. So now we're only fifteen dollars over budget. You can see by the time we get to the end where let's say for my sister Amy we spent eighty dollars, so we saved twenty dollars. So you need to track whether you're over or under budget so that you can compensate for that. "