16 December 2010

How Much Should You Spend on Gifts this Christmas?

Every Christmas presents a dilemma to the Christmas shopper: how to stay within a budget while shopping for everyone you're giving gifts to this year.

That dilemma then carries down to each individual gift purchase, as our hypothetical shopper must work how much to spend on each. Surely there must be a better way to work out how much to spend on each gift!

And yes, as it happens, there is! Brain Candy author Garth Sundem shows how to apply math to solve this problem of gift-giving with a budget:

Obviously, that kind of math is hard to work out while on the go, so we're happy to present a tool to help you make your shopping list! Just enter the indicated data below into our generic list below and we'll work out how much you should target spending on each:

Gift Buying on a Budget
Input Data Amount
Your Christmas Gift Budget
Individual for Whom You're Shopping Their Importance to You
[On a Scale of 1 to 10]
Person A
Person B
Person C
Person D
Person E
Person F
Person G
Person H
Person I
Person J

Your Christmas Shopping Budget per Gift Recipient
Calculated Results Values
Person A
Person B
Person C
Person D
Person E
Person F
Person G
Person H
Person I
Person J

We'll leave it as an exercise to you to identify just who Person A, B, C, etc. are when you print out the list and take it with you while shopping!

In the meantime though, we can recommend Garth's book Brain Candy as a fun book you might consider wrapping up giving as a gift this Christmas season.

And the best part is that Garth's gift-budget system isn't included in the book, so the recipient will have no idea how you decided to spend what you did on them!