ANDERSON COUNTY — Christmas is only 137 days away. Do you know how much money you are going to spend on presents this year? How much have you saved to pay for those presents?

I remember when I used to be b-r-o-k-e. Christmas always crushed our family’s economy. We never saved money for presents, so when December showed up, we pulled out our credit cards and proceeded to purchase the presents with money we did not have.

It was a terrible feeling. Awful. We would justify the expenditures by saying that “we had to get everyone something” and “we will use our tax refund to pay off the credit cards.” Neither excuse was absolutely true, but we felt that it justified our financial misbehavior.

I believe that the top two reasons that people fail with their finances is a lack of organization and the lack of a plan. Let us think about Christmas for a moment. Is it really a surprise that Christmas happens every year? Is it really a surprise that Christmas happens in December every year? Just like one’s own birthday, the month and day of Christmas never changes.

In December 2002, Jenn and I were in the process of pulling out the credit cards to finance yet another holiday when we experienced an I Have Had Enough Moment. I call it an “IHHE Moment”.

When one has an IHHE Moment, things change! We had had enough of financing Christmas. We had had enough of financing vacation. We had had enough of financing car taxes, annual health club fees, and several other known, upcoming expenses.

What did we do about it? We created a mini-budget for Christmas.

In our mini-budget, we wrote down the name of every person for whom we were purchasing a present. Next to each person’s name, we wrote down the maximum amount that we would spend. Once we completed that list (it took 15 minutes or less), we added up the amounts to determine the total amount needed. Our initial amount was too high, so we revised some of the numbers down to achieve our Christmas spending goal.

Once we knew how much we were going to spend for Christmas, we divided the number by 12 months to determine the amount we needed to save each month. If we are going to spend $1,000, then we need to save $83 dollars every month to achieve our goal.

Guess what? For Christmas 2003, we paid CASH for all of our presents.

There were no credit card bills coming to visit us in January. The feeling was so great that we have NEVER went back.

We use this same method to plan for our vacations or special parties. By being organized and planning in advance, this mini-budget tool has helped our family avoid debt for nearly six years. You can too!

Use the mini-budget tool located on the “Tools” page at JosephSangl.com!