Do you want to spend less money over the holidays? You can save thousands by switching to a Secret Santa. Or as we call it in our family, a Secret Shlomo, since we exchange gifts for Hanukkah. I’ll explain how we did it this year.
My siblings and cousins exchange gifts every year. As everyone has grown older, we’ve added partners to the mix, and now there are 8 of us in the group. That’s a lot of gifts to buy.
If each person had to buy a gift for 7 others, their total spending might be:
$20 per gift = $140
$30 per gift = $210
$40 per gift = $280
$50 per gift = $350
But wait; everyone would be doing this. So collectively, the entire group might be spending:
$20 per gift = $1,120
$30 per gift = $1,680
$40 per gift = $2,240
$50 per gift = $2,800
That’s a lot- the entire group might be spending thousands of dollars per year on gifts for each other.
Not only does that get expensive, but it can be a lot of work planning and keeping track of that many gifts to buy. With everything else going on this time of year, is that really what we want to focus all of our energy on?
To simplify our gift giving, last year we decided to switch to a Secret Santa. Everyone picks one name at random and then just gets that person one gift. You can simply draw names on slips of paper from a bowl or use a website like DrawNames. We set a spending limit of $50.
Now, each person spends $50.
As a group, we spend $400.
We might have been spending $350 per person or $2,800 as a group before. By dropping it down to just one gift, we saved $300 per person, or $2,400 across the entire group.
And best of all, we’re still getting presents!
This was the second year we’ve done this, and it was a big hit. I think we’ll continue with the tradition for next year.