How much do you spend on Christmas Presents?

[Curmudgeon]

Assuming you give Christmas presents to your children, how much do you spend per child?
(I'm using percentage of yearly spending in the poll answers, to normalize between people who are relatively thrifty and those who are big spenders. So if your yearly budget is 100K, and you spend $500 per child, that is 0.5%.)

 

[Teacher Terry]

My DH and I have 5 adult kids between us and spend 100 on each person or couple. No grandkids yet. We make 65k/year. When they were kids at home we spent much more $ on them.

 

[Car-Guy]

Total Christmas gifts cost this year totaled a little over $5000. About half+ of that was for gifts to local charities for needy kids in the area. So I don't know how that money was divided up for the kids.

 

[Walt34]

DW did virtually all of the spending for grandnieces and grandnephews. We agreed to a higher spend this year because the nephew and niece treated her and me (and most of the rest of the family) to a surprise 60th birthday party last month for DW at a very nice restaurant. Of course they wouldn't let us pay anything.

 

[Big_Hitter]

please define "yearly budget"

 

[W2R]

please define "yearly budget"

I don't have a budget, so I used my 2016 total spending on everything (including taxes, medical, the works).

My category was "0.5% to 0.75%", but if I had more than one kid I probably wouldn't spend so much on each one's Christmas present.

 

[Philliefan33]

I can't see polls on the mobile app, but we spent about 1% of our yearly spending on Christmas gifts. Most of that was a nice check to each of our daughters. They can use it and we don't need it.

 

[Big_Hitter]

I blow a ton of $$$ around xmas. I'm counting the lib roasts, the cases of champagne, the dinners, golf equipment/apparel I don't need, everything..oh gifts too

oh, we don't have kids so I guess I'm a zero for the pole?

my dad bought us a box of steaks so we can put him in the cheap category (like 0.1%? 10 basis points? that's pretty cheap)

 

[Philliefan33]

Oops, I didn't read carefully. The 1% was for all of our Christmas spending. It was about 0.8% on the daughters only

 

[youbet]

We've reached the age where Christmas giving has become part of estate planning (gifting), so our percentage is on the high end of the survey scale.

 

[2017ish]

I blow a ton of $$$ around xmas. I'm counting the lib roasts, the cases of champagne, the dinners, golf equipment/apparel I don't need, everything..oh gifts too

...

Does that constitute political commentary?

Now that our three millennials are comfortably self-supporting (and no grandkids yet), no gifting for us.

I should change my avatar to the Grinch, or good ole Ebenezer.

 

[jollystomper]

We spent just over 1% of our yearly expenses. This year we budgeted around $200 per child and $50 per niece/nephew (some of whom prefer we donate to one of their charities of choice, which we do instead). We don't by for our siblings, we all agreed 20+ years ago it isn't worth the stress (DW and I are both from large families).

 

[Big_Hitter]

Does that constitute political commentary?

Now that our three millennials are comfortably self-supporting (and no grandkids yet), no gifting for us.

I should change my avatar to the Grinch, or good ole Ebenezer.

i say lib sometimes instead of rib. habit from my leisure suit larry days.

 

[VaCollector]

As a parent who would like to "see them spend it while I'm alive" I chose the >2% slot but then that's TOTAL for my THREE children...whoops!

With the election results our 4th quarter results were in the OMG range and I tend to base what I give my children on that each year :O)

 

[Bestwifeever]

Numbers is hard (AND complicated, REW ). I guess my answer is more than DH wanted to give and less than I wanted to give. $ for adult kids, toys and clothes for little grands. Maybe between 1.5 and 2 for each adult kid including everything that their family received? It was a good year for all of us.

 

[Dreamer]

We have 2 children, but we also give the same amount to our son-in-law and our son's fiance. We have 3 grandchildren, ranging in age from almost 7 mos, 2 yrs and 8 yrs. Our son's fiance has a 19 yr old. We buy for them, but don't spend the same amounts per child.

 

[Curmudgeon]

please define "yearly budget"

I guess I mean, how much you spend in a typical year for any non-investment expenditure. Food, clothing, housing, healthcare, travel, etc. etc.

 

[Big_Hitter]

I guess I mean, how much you spend in a typical year for any non-investment expenditure. Food, clothing, housing, healthcare, travel, etc. etc.

good question

 

[aaronc879]

I can't afford kids. I spent nothing for Christmas.

 

[scrabbler1]

Proudly zilch here. I was born Jewish but have been an atheist for the last 40 years. No spouse or kids, either (I do have a LF but we don't trade gifts). Haven't spent a dime on Xmas stuff since 1994, the last year I was in my office's grab bag. I opted out after that year.

 

[ABQ2015]

I spent about $100 each on 9 nephews and nieces or their children. In most cases, I gave money to the parents to spend as they saw fit. So it probably went to buy items like clothes, not toys, but they have plenty of toys. None of the parents are doing great financially.

 

[KmmFIdreamer]

Spent <$10 on candy for my adult son that is still living at home and bought one $10 gift for the charity Angel Tree at work, so pretty close to 0%.

I tend to be pretty generous to the boys year round so I don't think they really need anything from me at the Holidays. The spouse and I would rather spend the money on vacation instead of buying gifts, so we quit Christmas shopping for each other a long time ago....

Most of the rest my family is 6 ft under now so they don't need anything anymore!

When I have grandkids, then I will probably spoil them rotten. In the meantime, I will enjoy not having to even think about Christmas shopping.

 

[panacea]

Never really looked at this way before... Guess we always kept the amount to a figure that we knew wouldn't impact our budget. I'm sure it's increased over the years as we've earned more money though... but not by much. Looks like the answer is .00146341. I think I could get a more accurate figure on my financial calculator but all I have handy is my phone.

 

[GalaxyBoy]

Whoops, didn't see the "kids" part. Don't have any, but voted in the lowest non-zero category. DW and I have been much happier since we decided on only stocking stuffers for each other and higher charitable donations with what we might have spent.

I would un-vote if I knew how.

 

[bclover]

I'm a huge Christmas lover (large Catholic family where celebrating and partying WAS the religion, lol) so Christmas is sort of our olympics, Oscars, and mardi gras all rolled into one.

Presents are usually the cheapest part of my budget. maybe $400 bucks a kid. food, alcohol and entertainment tend to blow me out of the water.

Then to top it off, my oldest son's b day is 12/27 and my bday is Jan 1st.

Yesterday this gal treated herself to some serious retail birthday gifting at the new King of prussia mall in Pa. Supposedly it's the largest shopping mall in America in terms of numbers of retailers.
My knee gave out waay before the mall did.

It's pretty much a party/celebration from 12/24 until 1/2 in this family