The Better Budgeting Podcast

Budgeting for the Holidays

• Danielle Reese • Season 3 • Episode 16

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How often do we lose sight of the true meaning of gift-giving amidst the holiday frenzy? This episode of the Better Budgeting Podcast invites you to rethink Christmas shopping with a heart-centered approach. Join me, Danielle Reese, as I reflect on my own holiday spending habits and share personal stories that highlight the joy of giving with intention. As Black Friday approaches, it’s easy to fall into the consumer trap, but together, we’ll explore ways to celebrate this season with love, joy, and community, ensuring that our holiday spirit isn’t overshadowed by financial anxiety.

We’ll tackle the art of Christmas planning and budgeting, with a special focus on building meaningful connections rather than equating love with the cost of gifts. If your gift list has become a source of stress, let’s reassess and prioritize what truly matters. By setting financial boundaries and aiming for a debt-free festive season, we can embrace the holidays with less stress and more love. I hope these insights empower you to navigate the season with both your heart and your wallet in mind. If you need a guiding hand, I’m just a message away on Facebook, email, or Instagram.

Danielle is a money coach helping women and couples who have been trying to figure out their finances FINALLY create a clear plan so they don’t have to worry about waiting to refill their bank account the next payday.

She is the founder of The Financial Freedom Society on Facebook and her signature money coaching program, The Better Budgeting Playbook. You can sign up for her newsletter by clicking here.

Take the first step towards financial freedom and sign up for a complimentary assessment call with me, Danielle Reese.


Grab your copy of "Let's Talk Groceries" Your Guide to Reducing Your Grocery Bill" This is an ebook with over 30 pages of tips, tricks, and guidance to help you save hundreds on your grocery bill!

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You can connect with her on Facebook or Instagram.

Speaker 1:

Hello and welcome to the Better Budgeting Podcast. I'm your host, Danielle Reese. I'm a money coach and the founder of the Better Budgeting Playbook, and this is my one-on-one coaching program for women and couples who have been trying to figure out their finances, finally create a clear plan so they don't have to worry about waiting on payday anymore. I became a money coach in 2020 after paying off over $60,000 in debt, rekindling my marriage, becoming financially free and wanting others to experience the same. If you'd like to work with me, you can check out the link in the show notes there. Also, we have the Financial Freedom Society on Facebook. It's a free Facebook community focusing on debt payoff, saving strategies, budgeting and money mindset. You can find the link to that community in the show notes as well, Merry.

Speaker 2:

Christmas, merry Christmas and happy holiday. Oh man, I love the NSYNC version of that. Oh, is it not the best christmas song ever? You can tell I am a millennial through and through, and today we are going to be talking about christmas shopping. Christmas shopping, yeah, this is such a hot topic and I am strategically placing it here on this date because, guess what? Black friday is here. Friends, it is here, and I want to just like give one last ditch effort before you go spending a fortune, to maybe change your mind, but hopefully it's to evaluate your spending habits and your intention with the holiday season.

Speaker 2:

I love the holidays. I wish I could decorate the day after Halloween, but my husband is like no, no, and this year we actually compromised on November 21st. So we have our tree up, we are decorated, we are ready to go, I'm singing the Christmas carols, we're eating the turkey with the Christmas tree. Okay, I know some of you are not like that. It has to go after Thanksgiving, but listen, I only get four weeks of Christmas this year because Thanksgiving is late. No, we're not doing it. I get my extra week. Okay, I want a solid five weeks of Christmas decorations.

Speaker 2:

Now, I do understand that not everyone is going to be like me and just happy and joyful about the holiday season, and you might have your own personal reasons of why that is, but I just want to uplift and just share with you that you are loved by me, by God Jesus, and that it is really a season about him and connecting with him and celebrating him. And we're going to talk about gift giving today. But I want you all to know where I stand. I'm a Christian lady and I truly believe that God is the center of the Christmas season and as humans, we have kind of demonized the holiday season in a way that doesn't align with God and his values, and maybe the word demonizing isn't correct, but it just seems that we get further and further and further from the real reason of Christmas. That doesn't mean that it's wrong. It just means that we kind of have to reevaluate our hearts, and that's my number one point here today is that we need to check our reasoning, we need to check our hearts. So are we gifting just because we've always done that, or are we gifting to bring joy? Are we gifting our kids five gifts each because that's what we've always done, or are we gifting one or two intentional gifts because it brings them joy and it brings us joy.

Speaker 2:

I think in our culture we have quickly made Christmas just a huge landmine of financial distress. Oh, my goodness, you don't have the tree, you don't have the wreath, you don't have the lights, you don't have the gifts, you don't have this, you don't have that. Like, oh, christmas is ruined. No, like Christmas is about Jesus and if you don't follow God, okay, that's for you, that's fine. I'm not saying that you're wrong. I'm just saying here is where my heart stands and what I've seen in the past and what might help kind of navigate this season if you're really struggling. And that is just again checking your heart, checking to make sure that are we celebrating what really needs to be celebrated or are we just filling our Christmas trees with things and our houses with junk or are we filling it with love and joy and compassion and empathy and just community?

Speaker 2:

I think that's really, really important when it comes to the holiday season is that it's not about the gifts, it's not about the decorations and all that other stuff, even though I did start this episode and saying like I just love it. I really do, I really love the way everything looks, but it doesn't have to be that way. Christmas doesn't have to look that way. So check your reasoning for all the gift giving, all right. And then if you are really valuing the gift giving, and that's okay, that's fine. My kids the other day went to Walmart and got like the little toy catalog and circled 9,000 things, thinking that this is just a conveyor belt of toys that are going to come into their lives.

Speaker 2:

But if you decide to give gifts, I want you to check your budget. If you have not checked your budget yet, if you have not created a budget yet, please don't blindly go out there and start spending. Don't be putting things on layaway. Don't be putting it on the credit card and saying, oh, we'll just take care of it at tax season, like let's stop the madness, all right, honey, let's stop that. I want you to find out what can you truly afford? If, between now and Christmas Day, you only have $300 to afford, go ahead, girl, go off with that $300. That's great, do that. But if you add anything over $300, what's it going to create? Turmoil, stress, anxiety, all those things that you're currently feeling right now. So try to do Christmas debt free. Try to pay cash for Christmas. Just get it out there, and I know that's going to be a struggle for some of you.

Speaker 2:

Some of you have always done certain things. You've always done the Christmas Eve tradition. You've always done Christmas Day traditions. You've always done the light shows. You've always done the nutcracker, whatever it is. You have to be willing to do things differently in order to change your financial life. If you don't start somewhere, nothing's going to change. So make sure we're checking out are we really gifting? Because it's bringing joy to ourselves and our lives and it's something that is needed as well not just wanted, but needed. And then are we checking our budget? Are we making sure that this isn't going to become a a stressor for us later down the road?

Speaker 2:

I would love to go and buy my husband a new motorcycle. Would love it. I would love to see his face. And, if you don't know, I bought my husband a motorcycle back in 2021. I think that was the year and now it's starting to cause us a lot of problems and we're looking at upgrading or just fixing. We're trying to evaluate all that stuff, but, like truly deep down, I would just love to buy my husband a motorcycle outright and just be like here you go, baby. I love you. I hope you love it. It looks great. That sense of joy that I would get by gifting him something is just amazing.

Speaker 2:

Right, but what would it do? Well, it's a secret purchase, essentially, and we don't do that in our household, so there's a secret purchase. Could it financially damage us? Could we have to add another payment? Could we see a reduce in savings significantly to buy it outright? There's going to be pros and cons to every single thing, so that's something I want you to also think about. If I go over the amount of money that I do have a set aside, is it going to be okay? What are the ramifications of this?

Speaker 2:

So, once you have a budget created and you have reasoning, I want you to create a list and I want you to check it twice, girly, okay and in that list I want you to include absolutely everything. Holiday related, everything. Every year, we do a family cookie day where we're baking dozens and dozens and dozens of cookies, and I bring stuff, my sisters bring stuff and we, you know, go ham all day long making cookies. Well, that costs a pretty penny between all the butter and flour and sugar and walnuts and candies and all that stuff. It costs money. So I add that into my holiday budget and, whether it's $50, $100, whatever it is, containers, all the tissue paper, all this stuff I add that into my budget and I want you to as well. I want you to as well. And then I want you to write a list of who you're going to buy for, what you're going to buy for them and what is that budget. So if you know I want to buy my parents camping chairs, then you go and you research camping chairs and you know that they're going to be $60, $50, $80, $20, whatever it is, and you're going to put that there and that is the budget. Now, if your budget in total is $300 and you've got 5, 6, 10 people to budget for, it allows you to start evaluating how much you're spending on each person.

Speaker 2:

And can we get creative with these gifts? I'm not going to share my creative gift for my family this year and friends, but it's going to be delicious if that's a hint. Can we get creative in making something? Can we re-gift something, which is so weird that people are like ew, don't re-gift stuff, but we literally like thrifting is a huge market right now, by the way huge. Can we thrift things? Can we reuse things? Can we sell things to make more money to gift new things? We just need to get creative on how do we cover all the people that we want to cover while staying within our limits.

Speaker 2:

And also, when you start listing out all these people, you might notice that some of this isn't actually bringing joy and you might feel like you're doing it out of obligation, like if you have a great niece that you see once a year. If that, like, do you really need to spend $50 or a $25 gift card on them? No, you don't have to. You can do whatever you want.

Speaker 2:

I think the whole point of Christmas is connection in Jesus, and anything added in extra is always wonderful, but I think it's really, really important to share that you're not obligated. And if you feel obligated, please just nix that in the butt right away. So add in everything everybody that you want to do. If you love to go get your holiday photos done and then send holiday Christmas cards, fantastic, I love that. I've done that in my lifetime too. Go ahead and add that into your holiday budget. Consume everything into that holiday budget so that you really have a number.

Speaker 2:

Now, if you go through this and you're like, wow, that number is really really high. We don't want to spend that much. Okay, start going down the list and seeing what you want to cross off. Don't make this so hard and complicated. This is truly about gifting and loving on people. It is not about the dollar amount that you have given them. Connect with people, love, empathy, compassion All of that is what the holiday season should encompass, not gifts. I hope this episode was helpful for you. If you have any questions, hey, send me a message here on Facebook or in my email or Instagram. You can find all that information in the show notes and with that, I'll see you next time. Take care, bye-bye.