How to budget and prepare for Christmas

Tsh Oxenreider, Author & Blogger, shares advice for parents on how to prepare and have a fun family Christmas on a tight budget
How To Budget And Prepare For Christmas - Budgeting Tips
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How to budget and prepare for Christmas

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We plan our Christmas all year long by budgeting a little bit throughout the year, so that by the time Christmas comes around, we have the money we need to celebrate. We take the total amount that we want to spend, divide it by 12, and save that amount of money every year. So for our Christmases we've gone simpler and simpler to where now we do things like keep our decor focused on things from the outside natural world. We bring in sticks, berries, pinecones and decorate with that, or just our kids' crafts, things that they've made we decorate our home with. Then we look at our schedule and streamline to only the things we want to do as far as events and traditions, and don't worry about the pressure of having to do it all. Then for our family gifts, we only give our children three every year, and they've known this from the beginning, so they don't expect any more than three and that really helps temper their expectations about what Christmas is going to be like. That helps us, as parents, decide what we're going to give them, because we know we're only going to give them three gifts and that really helps simplify our holidays. We don't feel this pressure of giving a lot, getting a lot and going overboard, and beyond our budget.

Tsh Oxenreider, Author & Blogger, shares advice for parents on how to prepare and have a fun family Christmas on a tight budget

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Tsh Oxenreider

Author & Blogger, SimpleMom.net

Tsh Oxenreider is the full-time blogger behind Simple Mom and the founder and creative director of Simple Living Media, a blog network dedicated to helping people live intentionally (while throwing perfection out the window). She thinks a library card, a Netflix subscription, and a passport are some of the greatest parenting tools in the universe. She’s a wife to Kyle, mama to Tate, Reed, and Finn, and is the author of Organized Simplicity and One Bite at a Time: 52 Bites for Making Life Simpler. She is currently working on her next book. Tsh and her nomadic family currently live in Bend, Oregon, but several dots around the globe have also been called home (her 7-year-old has been on 60 airplanes and counting). Together, they love to travel, read books, go camping, and make homemade pizza for Friday Family Movie Night.

Tsh writes about living simply and intentionally at Simple Mom, which was named one of the Top 100 Mom Blogs of 2012. She was also number 2 in the top 50 Twitter Moms of 2011, was named one of the Top 100 Mom Blogs of 2011, her blog was nominated for Best New Blog of 2008, and has been mentioned on Apartment Therapy, HGTV, Better Homes and Gardens, Food Network, CNBC, CNN, NPR, Parents Magazine, and more. She speaks frequently about blogging, writing, living intentionally, and motherhood in between changing diapers and hitting the 'publish' button. She is also an advocate for Compassion International, serving as one of their bloggers, and is a regular contributor at (in)courage. Tsh also records a podcast with Homefries called The Simple Mom Podcast, which during one week ranked second under NPR’s This American Life in most listened-to podcasts.

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Transcription: 
We plan our Christmas all year long by budgeting a little bit throughout the year, so that by the time Christmas comes around, we have the money we need to celebrate. We take the total amount that we want to spend, divide it by 12, and save that amount of money every year. So for our Christmases we've gone simpler and simpler to where now we do things like keep our decor focused on things from the outside natural world. We bring in sticks, berries, pinecones and decorate with that, or just our kids' crafts, things that they've made we decorate our home with. Then we look at our schedule and streamline to only the things we want to do as far as events and traditions, and don't worry about the pressure of having to do it all. Then for our family gifts, we only give our children three every year, and they've known this from the beginning, so they don't expect any more than three and that really helps temper their expectations about what Christmas is going to be like. That helps us, as parents, decide what we're going to give them, because we know we're only going to give them three gifts and that really helps simplify our holidays. We don't feel this pressure of giving a lot, getting a lot and going overboard, and beyond our budget.