Saving on Christmas Pt. 2 – Buying for Adults

Since we now know how much we are spending on each person or group of people the goal is to stay within the budget.  Adults tend to be specifically difficult since for many people any gift you can afford that person already has at least one of.  Most people resort to purchasing the latest gadget, but I suggest we get more creative and look at gifts that my be more memorable than the latest toy.

The primary example are gifts that I tend to call novelty gifts but many times they are the gifts that people remember.  My sister-in-law (wife of black sheep) is a master of this type of gift.  For years she would come up with a theme of what the gifts she and black sheep were giving the family.  One year it was cookies and we all got gifts that either had cookies inside, had pictures of cookies on them (I got Oreo boxer shorts), or allowed you to make cookies from a mix or recipe.  It took a lot of thought to find different cookie gifts for everyone but it makes it so that the whole family was looking forward to the next gift someone was opening just to see what was next.  With a good idea and dedicated shopping you can find inexpensive yet fun gifts for the entire family.

The secondary method I have used for adults is to purchase something at a massive discount.  My favorite is still Restaurant.com where you can purchase a $25 gift certificate for $10 and even less if you have a discount code (you can find these codes all the time on the deals page at our sister sight GroceryFreak.com).  The discount codes allowed me to purchase $50 gift certificates for each family member and spend less than $20.  This also allowed them to pick the restaurant instead of me guessing what best fit their pallet.  As a result, each couple got a night on the town at a very low cost and didn't break my budget in the process.

Using these two methods has kept our family's Christmas spending low and kept us from overspending our budget.

--This is Part Two of a series of post on not overspending on Christmas.  The other two posts are:
Saving on Christmas Pt. 1
Savingon Christmast Pt. 3 - Buying for Kids