Simone Spotlight - Tips to Prepare for the Holiday Season

Preparing for the Holiday Season

NovembeR 28th

🎉 Hey East Bay 🎉

With Christmas and Chanukkah around the corner, the holiday festivities continue. This is a great time of year to bring the family together, spend some quality time, make memories that will last a lifetime, and create or uphold long-lasting family traditions.

With so much to do entering December, the following weeks can become a bit overwhelming, it is easy to overindulge, spend more than originally planned, and get caught up in wanting to create the perfect holiday.

Here are a few tips to help plan for the Holiday, so you can spend more time enjoying the season with your family and less time worrying about what’s next.

1. Purge

Get rid of unused items in your home and donate them. Doing so will clear space for the incoming, and donating items will bless someone else (plus it’s a tax write-off!).

Need extra cash? Take the items to a consignment store and use the store credit to buy gifts your family will use. Also, consider getting together with friends and swapping your stuff!

2. Meal Plan

As our favorite time of the year gets closer, the craziness can make for rushed dinner times that often involve fast food and take-out. Not only will this hurt your budget, but it’s not good for you! 

Having a monthly meal plan will reduce costs, help you stay on budget, and keep you fit as we enter into a month when there are lots of holiday parties, goodies, and yummy food that can make it easy to overindulge.

3. Prepare cookies

Cookies are a classic holiday treat, if decorating cookies is a treasured tradition in your household, you can still prepare the dough beforehand so it’s ready to roll out and decorate when you’re ready to.

4. DECLUTTER

Before you start pulling out the holiday decorations, it’s best to declutter your space and reorganize. Rearranging rooms, organizing, and throwing things away will make your home feel fresh.

A clean home will help you keep a clear mind and when unannounced visitors come by you will be relaxed and happy to welcome them in to see your lovely holiday decor.

5. Prepare the table

If you’re hosting a holiday dinner at your house, setting an elegant yet festive table may be one of the more daunting tasks on your holiday to-do list. Thankfully, trendy and lavish table settings are easy and inexpensive to make with the right know-how.

A great website to look for just the right decorations for your holiday theme is Pinterest. There are always great tips for decorating, baking and DIYs. If you don’t have an account, you can sign up here. https://www.pinterest.com/

6. Make a list (and Check It Twice)

One of the first things you need to do to prepare your budget is to make a holiday season to-do list. Include everything from mailing out cards to making cranberry sauce. Everything you need to buy/do should be on your list.

Once your list is made, read through it and note when each task should be finished, and estimate how much money you’ll have to spend on each thing. This will help you spend your time and money more strategically.

Planning ahead like this will also help you avoid impulse buying and leave you more time to prepare meaningful and less expensive homemade gifts.

I personally keep a spreadsheet and track each holiday, this allows me to see how much was spent from the previous years, what did I buy people, what was successful, or what I can eliminate the next upcoming year.

7. Choose NO Debt

Even if you haven’t started saving for Christmas at this point, you can still create a budget. Use a simple spreadsheet in Google or Excel.

Create a budget for holiday decorations, gifts, food, cards, holiday parties, etc. With some good planning, you would be surprised how much you can accomplish.

8. Create a Gift Stockpile

Watch for items on clearance and purchase them for a gift stockpile. Holidays all around the year are a great time to get items on clearance, you can always store these in closets for later on in the year.

9. Create a Gift fund

Another alternative is creating a gift fund and putting away money for your holiday budget throughout the year.

If you are low on storage space or just don’t have time to go out shopping for deals every holiday, you might be better suited to setting aside a small amount from each paycheck $25-$50. These small increments will create a larger fund come the holidays and you will be able to buy your entire or nearly your entire gift list on Black Friday or Cyber Monday.