Sunday, October 19, 2008

How Much You Plan To Spend On Christmas Shopping

It is possible the simplest way is to make a choice how much you plan to spend on Christmas shopping and divide this amount by the number of gift recipients on your list. This type of budget strategy may be suitable if you plan on purchasing the same gifts for everyone on your Christmas list but it may not work out well if you want to purchase something very special for a few of your closest friends or relatives.

For illustration you may make a choice to pay out 50% of your total budget on close friends and relatives, 25% of your total budget on business associates, 15% of your total budget on acquaintances and the remaining 10% on Christmas gifts for charity drives. Then you can use these numbers to establish the total amount of money you will spend on each category and divide that number by the total number of people in each category to figure out a dollar amount for each person on your Christmas list.

A final strategy for establishing a budget for your Christmas shopping is to start out by determining how much you plan to spend on some of the most important people on your gift recipient list. This can either be done arbitrarily by dividing the remaining amount in your budget by the number of people left on your list or you can continue to go through your list selecting a dollar amount for each person until you reach your budget.