A Basic Holiday Spending Plan

I made my first official holiday gift purchase last night, which makes this the perfect time to talk about my plan for holiday spending this year. As I'm sure you can imagine (and maybe relate) I lose my fiscal sanity around this time of year and usually find myself a ball of anxious nerves waiting for my credit card bill to arrive come January. What makes matters worse is all the hard to pass up on sales. I probably end up spending as much on myself as I do on others this time of year. Considering I have some pretty aggressive goals set for paying my credit card off by the end of March I needed to establish plan for this holiday season.

First off, I decided to start shopping as early as possible to spread my spending over more credit card statements. Thanks to my uncanny ability to procrastinate early=November. So I will have two credit card statements to work with.

I also put a spending plan in place. Note I said spending plan instead of budget. Doesn't it just sound better? Anyway, I have a budgeted number of what I want to spend total, but didn't limit what I could spend on each individual's gift.

Here's what it looks like:

I tried to include a category for anything I could spend money on.

At the end of the season, if there is money left over, I will be putting that towards my debt.

In addition, SSBF still split up our gifting duties according to our respective families. Which I would assume is what most people do, but what do I know.

 What's your spending plan this year for the holidays? Do you set a budget for each individual? Total? When do you start your shopping?