Yes, I’m already thinking about Christmas.  Actually, most of you probably are too I’m guessing.  If you are like me, you feel like the Fall season flies by.  School starts, then you have birthday parties and football games.  Then, before you know it it’s Halloween, with Thanksgiving right on it’s tail, and then there is it.  Christmas.  It’s here before you have time to get all your shopping done early, like you say you are going to do every year.

Oh wait, is that just me?  Well, anyway.  I HAVE to get my shopping done early this year.  We are traveling to Australia for Christmas and I have to PACK all of the gifts.  And still have room to bring them back, plus others.  It’s going to be interesting.

So, first of all…saving MONEY. My family and my husband’s family all decided a few years ago to draw names for the adults.  With my family, for example, it’s me, my husband, my sister and her husband, one of my Aunts, one of my cousins, and my parents.  These are the people I would usually buy for before we did the name drawing, with the exception of my cousin, but she wanted to participate in the draw names, so she’s in!

We all agreed on a dollar amount.  We chose $50.  This way everyone can get one good gift, opposed to a bunch of little things worth ten bucks that you don’t really want anyway.

We use Elfster.  You enter all who are participating and you can also exclude certain people, like husband’s/wives from getting each other, which is cool.  Then, it randomly generates your pick and emails it to you, secretly.  We always keep it a secret who we have.  Though, I always know who my hubby has since I do all the shopping.   It’s also got a place where you can put your wish list for your Santa to see what you want.

We only do Elfster for the adults since everyone wants to buy for all the kids.  So, we save money with our niece and nephews in Australia by buying things here and taking (or mailing) it to Australia.  Good stuff is way cheap here in comparison.  I’m talking WAY less.  Plus, I can get summer stuff on sale, since they are going into summer in a few months.

For our boys, I just keep reminding myself that it’s not HOW MUCH we spend.  Our youngest, doesn’t even know about Christmas, for starters.  And our oldest is happy with even a few things.  If it’s something he can pretend play with, he will be busy for hours.  Honestly, he would probably just be happy with candy, since he rarely gets any.  I just have to remember this and not get caught up in the Christmas buying frenzy.  Luckily, my husband’s family is further along the less is more end of the spectrum than my family.  I’m really looking forward to that this year, actually.

Now, for saving SPACE! Since we have to pack all (or at least most) of our gifts for the kids this year, we have to think SMALL.

So, I’ve been trolling Amazon looking for ideas for small, packable gifts that will still make an impact and be fun for our older son, who is four.  Our youngest (currently 13 months) won’t really care since he still won’t really know what’s going on and will really only want what his brother has anyway.  That’s how he rolls.

Here are some of what I’ve come up with so far:

• LED head lamp – like for camping.  He would LOVE this.
• Wikki stix – are these fun?
• stomp rocket
• Wishing Chair Again by Enid Blyton – I’ve been looking forever for the over sized version of this and finally got one off ebay for a steal!  So siked.  He asks me all the time if I’ve found it yet.  He loves the first one, Adventures of the Wishing Chair.
• Brain Quest -  these are great for planes too
• My Very Own Name book – we already got him this too as he wanted one after seeing the one we got our youngest for his birthday
• Gift voucher for something like a jumping castle place (you know those places that have about 10 jumpy houses).  We have one near our house and he’s always asking to go after going to a birthday party there.
• I want to crochet both my boys stockings before we go, but I am unsure if I can manage it.  I don’t know how to crochet, but my Mom is going to try to teach me this week.

Hmmm, I actually thought I had more ideas than this.  And frankly, I have no clue about what to get our youngest, who will be 15 months by then.

Any ideas ??

You can find more tips of all sorts at Works for Me Wednesday.

I am doing neither of these things, unfortunately.

With both of my son’s birthdays, my nephews birthday, Father’s Day (in Australia) and eight baby gifts to buy, I am definitely not spending less these days.

We have also been rehabbing our mudroom from a utility room to more of a proper mud room/entry area, since this is how we usually enter our house.   Not sure why we never thought of it before.  Will post photos when we are done.

Also have my sister-in-law and her friend coming this weekend from Australia, so have been buying extra food and beer.

So, also not much time to post the items I have to sell on Craiglist either.  Will do all of this in a couple of weeks after the birthday parties are done and the guests have left.

However, I’m having a great time reading about all of you who did a fabulous job during Musing of a Midlife Mom’s Spend Less Month and are doing great during High Class, Low Income’s No Spend Month, and earning more during Money Funk’s September’s Earn More Challenge.

Both the posts and comments from the participants have all sorts of great ideas.  All of which I will have to re-read in a couple of weeks in order to starting making up for lost time…er, money, over the past couple of months!

Some of the things Australians do to save money are not quite the same as in the US.  I mean, there are the general, “take your lunch to work“, etc that of course is pretty much the same everywhere, but there are some things that are quite a bit different.

There are no coupons for example!  That’s right, no coupons for grocery shopping.  This, I think, my send some people around here into cardiac arrest.

But, they do advertise sales frequently and do things like mark down fresh items substantially right before closing on certain nights.  I wish we had something like that.  I would make a routine of it and stock up my freezer on marked down bread or whatever.

This site here has more of what some people do in Australia to save money.  I found it very interesting with some good links for things like watching movies for free (still don’t see how it’s legal, but whatever), and the Australia version of Freecycle and another site called Freagle where you can also get things for free.

In the US, many companies offer Flexible Spending Accounts (FSA) for medical expenses.  You put in a set amount for the year that is divided into the number of paychecks you have, and then the money is taken out (pre-tax, thus lowering your taxable income) accordingly.  We track our FSA qualified spending each year to determine how much to put in each year.

To get that money back, you submit a claim form and the qualifying receipts to your company and they will either mail you a check or put the money into a designated account.

That money comes out of my husband’s paycheck each month, and put into our FSA account and invariably I forget all about it.  It’s like a forced savings account!

If I don’t see it, it doesn’t exist….which is why having savings deducted from the front end, before it gets to us, like a 401k or having money directed into a savings account, can be so great.

So, I knew that we had some money that I could claim from our FSA account.  And, after my husband’s ladder fall, I have PLENTY of claims to submit in order to get the money.

A few weeks ago, I received and email reminding me that we had money to claim back.   I didn’t realize that we had $650 waiting for us to claim!  Woo hoo!  Super excited.  That’s about what we’ve paid out so far after my husbands fall too.

Then, I started thinking that this would be a great way to save for Christmas!

You could just treat it like a Christmas Club!  Just leave the money in your FSA account until you are ready to shop and then submit all your claims.

Granted, you aren’t earning any interest on it, but the money is taken out pre-tax, lowering your taxable income.  So, if you company offers an FSA plan and aren’t taking advantage of it, you are already missing out on some great savings.   The best part is that you just can’t access the money anytime like an ATM, you have to submit the claim forms and wait, thus making it harder to spend.

What are some ways you save for Christmas/birthday spending?

This past weekend we had my youngest son’s first birthday party.  We went out for ice cream on his actual birthday, then had a party on the weekend.  As always with my family, the party was complete mayhem and I was glad it when it was over.

The cake turned out great though!  I was so happy with it.  It was blue and white in the shape of a #1.  So sweet!

I still have my oldest son’s party to get through in a month.  It will be the first party where we invite friends from his pre-school.  It will be complete chaos I’m sure.  And, we are having it at home.  Not sure if that is a wise choice, but I don’t want to change the date if it rains or transport the cake that I plan to make, so we will just hope for the best.

Not sure where everyone is going to eat cake, but I will deal with that later.  Maybe I can borrow a picnic table or something.

We are going to a cabin in a couple of weeks for a friend’s daughter’s 7th birthday.  My friend gave her the choice of gifts or doing something.  She chose doing something without a 2nd thought.  So, they rented a cabin that has 3 bedrooms and sent out an open invitation to others to ether stay in one of the 2 extra bedrooms, get their own cabin or tent camp, or just visit for the day, since it’s a National Park.

I think this is a SUCH a great idea and am definitely going to start doing this as my boys get older.  I love the idea of teaching them to recognize that experiences with friends and family are more valuable that stuff and that there is often a trade off.

We are having a ‘no presents’ party anyway for the friends.   Big D will get enough from family to warrant anything else from others.   That’s a hard one for me though since he loves giving gifts.  I sort of feel like I’m depriving his friends of giving him something if they want to, but I would really love it if they just made him a card we could keep in his scrapbook.  Maybe I will mention that on the invitation in a cute poem or something.

Is there something special or a tradition that you do for birthdays with your kids?