Gift giving and staying out of debt

Birthdays and holidays can make it difficult when you are either broke, trying to get out of debt, or both. We had a birthday party for a friends child to attend to tonight. An adult friend is easier, we just don’t exchange gifts, but for a child you feel as if you have to bring something and we wanted to but we also just racked up one thousand dollars on our home depot card during our remodel, have a new house payment we didn’t have before and spent two hundred dollars we didn’t have on a couch last night (we have no living room furniture and our backs could no longer take the lawn chairs). We still wanted to buy him something fun.

So what did we do? We spent thirty dollars we didn’t have on two small gifts from Toys ‘R’ Us. This got me to thinking about what we could have done differently. We have a “gift fund” in our budget but the money never actually makes it there so instead of fighting it I should find something else that works.

A little planning would have helped. We have known about this for a week so I could have used some of the cheap gift bags I pick up regularly that cost about fifty cents as opposed to leaving it to the last minute, not looking for the cheap gift bags I already own and then spending four dollars on one in the checkout line. We also were in a hurry because we were late (something very rare for us) so we couldn’t even look for something on sale or even run to Wal-mart. We had to hit the closest store and the closest aisles instead.

He did love our gifts, which always make you feel good but not as good as spending less than thirty bucks would have felt. We would have saved at least a little money if we had just planned the event a little better.