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Holiday Budget

Unfortunately, this year I feel a little bit under-prepared for the upcoming holiday season. I am still managing to generate some extra income so I am not so concerned about spending a decent amount. However, the problem is that I cannot figure out exactly what is "decent". I need to buy presents for a fairly short list of people, but I would really like things to be nice and well-thought-out.

I generally try to make it easy for people to shop for me by creating/updating my amazon wish-list as my birthday and christmas roll-around. I encourage people to buy used items from reputable sellers because I have had very good experience with that before. For music, books, and dvds, it doesn't matter to me if they are used as long as they work. However, depending on the person, the might consider getting a "used" gift to be tacky. So I would check with people beforehand. I generally like it because that means I will get more of the stuff that I want rather than just one brand new item.

Next Friday will be the big test for me though; I have to buy most of the gifts at that point. My mom and I do a yearly shopping trip where I take the day off from work and we head out to a local mall. I like it because it is a great way to spend time with my mom and also for us to co-ordinate on bigger gifts for people in our family if we are doing a chip-in sort of thing. I wonder if my 300 dollars will be enough? How much do other people spend?


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Anonymous said…
I'm feeling a little overwhelmed this year too. I think it is the dichotomy between the fact that the average borrower spends about $700 on all their gifts and the fact that advertisers would have us believe they are buying cars and $3,000 televisions.

We're having a holiday credit and debt haiku contest to express these types of frustrations on CreditBloggers.com today. You should enter!
10:28 AM
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