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With the holidays fast approaching, I’ve been thinking about Christmas shopping. In my family, we always make wishlists so we know what to buy each other. Sure, there are always surprises (my sister is going to be amazed with what I bought her this year), but sometimes, you want to buy a gift for someone, but don’t know what to get. I would prefer to remove some of the surprise but know that what I bought was wanted and enjoyed. That’s more important to me than surprising someone.
Sometimes, this is hard though. Having just moved, my wishlist is mostly things like “a leaf blower” and “Home Depot gift cards so I can buy paint.” Not the most exciting thing. And I’m getting family reactions to that. “These aren’t fun gifts!” True, but they are things that will make me happy.
How do you feel about practical gifts? Do you prefer to give something that you know will be used again and again, or do you go for the one time “Wow” factor?
Megan is a 40-something government employee in the Washington, DC area. She got interested in Personal Finance when she got out of college and realized that her paycheck wasn’t going to go as far as she had hoped. Since starting this blog, she has managed to buy a house and make a solid start on her retirement goals, and hopes to help others do the same. Here is her story:
In 2007, I was a gainfully employed 20-something with no debt but not a lot of knowledge about personal finance. It was a co-worker’s comment about Roth IRAs that sent me to the internet, searching for information. It was then that I realized that I really didn’t know a whole lot about personal finance and that my current financial situation was due a lot to inherent frugal tendencies, generous family members, a fear of debt, and good luck. While that was working for me, clearly I needed a better plan.
While I had no debt, I was also pretty much living paycheck to paycheck and not worrying about going over budget (I say this as if I had a real budget) because I had an emergency fund set aside to cover any overages.
Except that’s not what an emergency fund is for.
So I did a lot of research, read a lot of blogs, and decided that I needed a plan. I needed to budget. I needed to know what I was spending my money on. I needed to prepare for the future.
I decided to create a blog not only to make myself accountable to others but also to share the knowledge that I gained along the way. I’ve learned so much from my fellow bloggers, and I hope that my readers can find something useful in what I have to share as well.
We have been creating actual lists for years. After we all moved out of our parents’ house, there was no way mom was going to be able to see what we might like or need or want. And since the returns process has never been easy, we just started creating lists of various things we would like. I’m not just talking about a wish list, but rather we provide catalog numbers and color options and sizes. This is to ensure that there are no mistakes (of course, if I put something on my list but I don’t like it when I get it, it’s not the giver’s fault). The trick to being surprised is to put way more stuff on the list than you will receive so that you don’t know exactly what you will receive. When I used to wear ties, I only had 2 rules: they had to be silk and no stripe designs. Of course, the practical list concept only works with family.
And, when I first bought my house 11 years ago, I did the same thing: HD gift cards and similar items were welcome.
Right now, my wish list consists of 1 item: get a job.
11/23/2011 – 11:50am.
Practical, all the way. While plenty of people have given me beautiful, thoughtful, fun items over the years, if it isn’t something useful it just becomes clutter. I live in a small space, and long ago reached the point that if something new is coming in then something old has to go. Though even more than practical items that I will definitely use, my favorite gifts tend to be the ones that are about experiences rather than stuff.