Christmas is always a great time of year and this year was no exception with the addition of Baby Beagle to the fray.  He made it a lot of fun even though he really had no idea what was going on.  Still, when we took him to see Santa, he gave Santa one look and then broke into the biggest smile, which won over Santa and everybody else that was in the area.

This past season, we created a budget and we also used money towards Christmas that we had started saving back in January.  I contributed an equal amount every month that was ‘earmarked’ for Christmas gifts.  In the past, we always paid our Christmas bills off, but we could handle a bigger bump in expenses for the month because both my wife and I were working.  Now that my wife is staying at home with Baby Beagle, we have less wiggle room for big fluctuations in our monthly spending, so the monthly contributions worked great.

I’m happy to report that, in addition to Christmas being over at our house (the decorations came down this past weekend), we have paid everything off.

How’d we do?

Pretty good!

We had crafted a budget prior to Christmas, and the overall number that we spent was pretty close.  There are always a few tweaks here and there but in the end, the final numbers came out to the amount we had budgeted.  This meant that we had enough in our ‘gift’ fund to cover the payments in full.

And, I was pleased to see that our payments to our credit card to cover the costs cleared last night.  Even though we always pay everything off, both my wife and I do most of our Christmas shopping on credit cards, simply so we can earn the 1-2% cashback rewards from our Citi Dividend Platinum cards. 

So, Christmas in officially in the books and I am very pleased!

Posts you might enjoy:

1. Crafted Our Christmas Budget
2. Review of October 2009 Goals / Setting November’s Goals