Holidays on a Budget

With Halloween a couple of weeks behind us now and Thanksgiving around the corner, this is an easy time to blow my budget out of the water. The one with the most potential is Christmas, and now that my second job is in retail I’m reminded of how close it is.

My Halloween costume was practical; I only ended up buying a flannel from Goodwill and a thermal shirt from Marshall’s. So I saved the budget there only spending $15! For Thanksgiving, we are actually going to be taking a road trip to visit my girlfriend’s family in Nashville. To cut down on transportation costs we are car pooling and splitting the cost of gas among everyone. To cut down on food costs we’ll be bringing the ingredients with us and making it ourselves down there instead of paying for catering. I usually go pretty big with Christmas presents for my family, so to help with that potential budget buster we sat down and set a spending cap for everyone. Since we’ve moved away, this year the holidays are really about spending quality time with family that we don’t get to see as often!

What are you doing to plan ahead for the holiday budgets? Do you have any tips or handy tricks to share?