Episode 53: Preparing for the Holidays-Aligning Your Budget
What You’ll Learn
Take a Broad Overview of Your Holiday Budget Categories (01:10)
What will you spend in each category? (07:15)
Look at Your Spending by the Week (09:50)
Recap (13:40)
Invitation (14:00)
The holidays with kids are both incredibly beautiful and overwhelmingly full of challenges, like organizing all the people, planning meals, packing for trips or preparing for guests, not to mention all the gifts & MORE! Today we'll address the dreaded 'B' word (it's 'Budget'). We are adulty adults...adulty adults talk about budgets, and more importantly, aligning our budgets for the holidays.
Take a Broad Overview of Your Holiday Budget Categories (01:10)
During the holidays, there are several different budgeting categories that will need a buffer (or a little more room).
Sidenote: Invite your spouse! It’s REALLY important to work with your spouse on holiday spending. Align it ahead of time, work to reduce friction, and get on the same page!
In every relationship there’s a spender and a saver, and that’s ok!
Your husband loves you, you are a team, he wants the best for you, but you need to communicate and collaborate! Savers and spenders balance one another out, so keep communicating and working together!
Grocery costs WILL increase during the holidays! There are feasts, shared meals…LOTS of eating!
Charity is another area where you may need to allocate a little extra. The gifts for teachers, cashiers, random acts of kindness…all these things require a little more money.
Gifts for your people can become a big category. Communication is KEY here because you need to think about who you’ll exchange gifts with, and how that will fit into your budget.
Travel, hosting visitors, and entertainment will ALSO require some attention.
The idea is here to limit surprises this holiday season. Put in a little thinking ahead of time, and hopefully you’ll have less surprises this year.
What Will You Spend in Each Category (07:15)
The biggest and first question here is, does your income support this level of spending? (Because, sometimes it doesn’t).
Put your estimates down on paper and DON’T be an uninformed optimist. If your income does support this level of spending, GREAT! If it doesn’t, here are a few ideas to get you going…
Go back and review your budget for areas where you can make cuts. Is there something you buy every month that you can let go of this month? Maybe there’s a big plan you were going to participate in, and you’ve decided not to do that anymore. Perhaps, instead of paying for a million activities per kid, they get to pick one. When the school plans a musical and needs you to buy the hat, and the shirt, and the treats to share, you can say, “Thank you,” I’d like to donate a little money, but we’ll need to bow out this time.
These harder ‘nos’ create better ‘yesses’ for other areas of our budget. If you’ve looked through and figured out what you need in other areas, you may need to say some hard ‘not’ but they don’t have to be bad ‘not’ and they CAN be a gift.
It’s not always easy to make the cuts, but the adulty thing is to make the cuts.
Look at Your Spending by the Week (09:50)
When you break your spending out by each week, it gives us a target that we need to be hitting, and it keeps us accountable. A budget isn’t something you write down just once, it is a living thing! Your first draft of the budget will not be your last! It will change, week-to-week, and day-to-day. Look at your spending, figure out where you’re under and over and reallocate as quickly as possible.
If you see that one area of the budget is getting out of hand, pull your spouse in and put your heads together and figure out TOGETHER how you’ll reallocate. Keep one another informed, in a graceful way, and invite them into the solution.
The problem is there, but you have everything you need to fix it. When you make these decisions together, you have the opportunity to see the money you spend in a different way.
Britt & Brandon spend their money as intentional as possible, but this doesn’t mean they’re penny pinchers! They do one-on-one dates with their kids, they go on dates together, and they get to do fun little extras BECAUSE they spend intentionally the rest of the month.
Just because you’re following a budget, it doesn’t mean you can’t have any fun! If anything, if you’re paying attention to your spending and reallocating, sometimes you get to reallocate to more fun!
Invite your spouse in, and invite them in as you make adjustments too-because they may have great ideas you didn’t think about!
Recap(13:40)
Get a bird’s eye view of the budget categories that will need some buffering over the holidays.
Take an honest look at what will really fit in your budget within those categories.
Break out your spending by week and then review each week and adjust where you need to.
