Episode 34 - Christmas gifting, planning, and shopping tips with Taryn Scarfone

My first ever guest on the Podcast!! My wife Taryn joins me and we discuss Christmas gifting, planning, and shopping tips. 

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Paul, Welcome to Catholic money talk, where we talk about all things money and finance, and we try to do it through a lens of being Catholic, where our ultimate goal is to one day be in Heaven with the Lord. I am your host. Paul Scarfone, thank you for being here today. Today I'm joined by my favorite person in the world, my wonderful wife, Taryn, and we're going to talk about Christmas shopping, gift buying, budgets for that some money saving tips. But before we do that, let's begin with a prayer in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen, Heavenly Father. We thank you for this day. We thank you for all the ways that you love us and bless us. We ask You for all the grace and wisdom we need to face the challenges that we might find ourselves in, Lord, we know that you have an awesome plan for us. Please allow us to yield to your Holy Spirit. We ask all this through Jesus. Name Amen, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen. So hello Taryn. Hi Paul. I'm a little nervous because this is the first time I'm having a guest on Catholic money talk. But welcome to my little podcast. Thanks. Happy to be here. So Taryn and I have been married 20 years. We have six kids. We've got tons of family, extended family, friends, people that we include in our gift giving around Christmas. And I thought it would be great to have Taryn go over some of the things that we do in our family. She's the one who manages most of the gift purchasing. I think the only people I buy for are basically her. And then sometimes, if I'm feeling generous, maybe a couple of my kids. But outside of that, Taryn does all the Christmas shopping. So Taryn, my first question for you is, how do you determine who you need to buy gifts for we, besides buying gifts for our immediate family, so all of our children are then our own parents and siblings, we have basically tried to limit it to our God children. We buy gifts for any of our God children. We buy gifts for Yeah, just like our own brothers and sisters, some aunts and uncles, whoever we see at Christmas who will normally give us a gift, we do like to return their generosity by buying them gifts in return, some of the things we've done over the years for our children. They have 20 cousins on Paul's side of the family, so instead of us buying gifts for all of our nieces and nephews, the kids each choose a name out of a hat, so to speak for and they each buy a gift for one of their cousins, instead of everybody, everyone buying gifts for all of the children. So that's that's helped with the Christmas budget. And then even in my family, with my siblings, there's myself plus six others. We do a Secret Santa Elfster is the website we use that'll randomly kind of match us up, and we set a gift limit on it with our with my my siblings, taryn's family's smaller on her side, so we get something for on my side. We do buy gifts for everyone, including my my aunts and uncles, but we normally keep that to under $20 gifts. I will most of the time buy the same gifts for each of my four or five aunts and uncles. That's Taryn. When do you start Christmas shopping? I Christmas shop a little bit here and there almost all year long, but mostly, most of it's in November. I really like to be done buying gifts before Advent starts. There are always some last minute people or things that I forget, but I really like to finish up the gift purchasing so that then we can devote Advent to other things, and wrapping gifts and making Christmas crafts and baking cookies and all the other parts of getting ready for Christmas. Where do you keep all these gifts as you're buying them? One thing that we have done, especially, which has helped with our own children, is that most of our children's gifts come from us. We do do Santa, but they only get one or two gifts from Santa, so that when they see all the packages arriving in the mail, they don't get suspicious, because they know that we're buying gifts and that we're buying gifts for them. So most of the gifts end up stored in the corner of our bedroom in cardboard boxes, a box per kid, basically it. I end up dividing them up, a box per kid, because then when it's time to wrap we do one pattern of wrapping paper per kid, just to make Christmas morning. To go a little easier. So you wrap all the gifts. You don't use gift bags. I don't use gift bags. Paul really prefers his gifts to be wrapped in wrapping paper, which I learned our very first Christmas when I put his gifts in gift bags. And he was a little disappointed on Christmas morning. There's something about being able to rip open a gift and pull all the paper off it, than just pulling off the top piece of tissue paper and peering inside and seeing what it is. I agree. But when it gets to the point that there are 100 gifts to be wrapped, because there probably are, by the time we're done buying for everyone 100 individual gifts, it does take some time to wrap them all well. Thank you for doing that and loving our kids so well like that and me. So a question I have is, you know, we'll go to extended family parties celebrating Christmas, and we try to figure out who's going to be there, right? If someone's bringing their fiance, boyfriend, girlfriend, maybe there's additional cousins that are in town this year that typically aren't there, and we might not want to go empty handed. So what do we do? What do you do in those situations when we find maybe more people are going to be there than we originally anticipated on our budget, I will normally pick up a few gifts on clearance through the year, kind of like general things. So if I know ahead of time someone is going to be there, an extra person, I can go into my gift stash and pull out a scented candle or bath towels or whatever, I think is a pretty generic gift that anyone would like to receive. It's a little easier if we are hosting at our house, because I can always just pop into the closet and grab that one last gift. If we're going to someone's house, sometimes I will actually bring an extra gift or two, because I really don't want someone to feel left out. And if, if I don't need those gifts, I'll just bring them back home and save them for the next time. And you actually accumulate little gifts that might be on sale, or you think could be for other people, for multiple different things through the year. I know this because we have a box of gifts in the attic where, if we've got a godchild, where it's their birthday or baptismal day, or a kid gets invited to a, you know, another kid's birthday party, you've got a little stash of things that we already have. We don't actually need to make a purchase. We actually have five large plastic bins in the attic, and they're divided by boy, girl, baby, adults, men, adult women. So if I see something on sale, on clearance, I'll pick it up and pop it into the appropriate bin, so that when an event or a birthday or something comes up, I do have choices for gifts without having to run into the brunch of the store last minute to purchase something. I really do like to buy things when they're on sale. So as an example, last week online, there was the classic Connect Four game, and it was on sale for $5 and it was buy two, get one free. So I picked up three of them. They cost $3 each, and now they are saved for any time we need a gift. If it gets to be a year or two and we haven't actually gifted them, I also like to donate some of those things to the local toy drive. And so a question I have, we just met the other day, talking about our kind of November, December budget a little bit, and particularly the gift buying, and what money we had available this month in the budget for Christmas gifts, and how much money we'll have in the budget next month for Christmas gifts. So how do you literally, what are the logistics for Taran to keep track of who we're buying gifts for and how much we're spending on each person? What do you actually do? I use a Google Sheet, and I use it every year, so I will copy from the previous year and just delete the details, and then I have a running list of people that we do buy gifts for how much we spend most of the time. We try to keep gift giving for our kids, the smaller children, is under $100 the older children tends to be a little more just because when they get older, things are more expensive. And there's been a few like big ticket gifts over the years. Our son wanted a BMX bike, so we did, we did decide to get him that, even though it was several$100 because it was what he really wanted, and we knew he would love it, and we were just happy to love him in that way. But for the smaller. Children especially, I do buy things on sale. I buy things on clearance. We have purchased things used off Facebook marketplace. One interesting thing was, I decided to buy a just a small little kid. It's like a plastic like ramp for cars. And I would normally buy that kind of thing used, but the price new was the same price as used. I didn't realize that it would take me three hours to put that thing together on Christmas Eve. So even though it was the same price, in retrospect, I wish I had just bought it used. Yeah, it was already assembled. Yeah, yeah. Sometimes some of those things, it's much easier to get them pre assembled so and on the list. Just to go back to the Google sheet that you mentioned, you've got it every year. You've got a new tab for each year. You're also able to actually see what you've purchased for people, especially when it comes like aunts and uncles, where we might not always be thinking what we got them. We don't want to give them the same candle every year, right? You have that. You're not I do have that. Yes, I'm nodding, but we're on a podcast, so they can't see that. Oh, when shopping for gifts, how do you do most of your shopping? Do you are you going to stores? Are you one of these? Get up at 4am on Black Friday with a thermos full of coffee and go for all the deals and add to the mass chaos that's happening, I've realized over the years that I greatly prefer online shopping. Most of our gifts do just come from Amazon because they have great prices. I also do like to support local businesses, so at least I try to have at least a few of them come from places like Etsy, and not just all from Amazon. Okay, so with all your shopping, with all your tracking of how much you've spent on everybody, and making sure you've kind of got something for everyone on your list, what are just in general, what are just some money saving tips that you have for staying under budget or within budget and getting all the gifts. So the first one I would recommend there is a website called Camel, camel, camel. So that's three camels, and on that website, you can paste in a URL to a specific Amazon product. You can see the price history of the ups and downs, and you can set an email alert so that you will get an email when that price drops to the price you want to pay for that item. So if there's something very specific that I want to buy someone this is a great way to make sure that I get a great price on that item without having to check the price constantly. That's a great tip. Another thing that I love to do is we buy a lot of the clothes for our family from Costco online, Costco will frequently have either 50 or $60 off 10 items. So when you're going through the clearance clothes, they will also have many items just marked at at or under $10 so if you buy 10 items for $100 but you're getting 50 or $60 off, this equals really inexpensive clothes. So I will do this specific deal a few times a year, and then save those clothes for my children, whether, if there's a need, they can obviously have the thing that they need, or I will save them and gift it to them, especially the older kids, don't mind getting clothes as a gift at this point. Cool. So camel, camel, camel. And then Costco online, yeah, and Costco, buying those things online at Costco is oftentimes cheaper than buying them in this tour, if you're buying in quantities of 10, and that's you can mix and match. It's not 10 of the same item. Okay, so those are your two money saving tips. I have one more. Okay, there is another website called Jungle deals, that you can paste in an Amazon URL and see the different price variations for the colors and the sizes. Sometimes it's hard to find that information when you're on Amazon, because you have to keep choosing and changing the different colors and the different sizes. And this will just show you the price of each item in each color and each variation. So, like, if you wanted to buy a particular like slippers or something for someone, and you know, they probably don't really care so much about the color, as much as you can just quickly and easily see which color is the cheapest. And sometimes those can be very different in price. Yes, that's that's really cool. Okay, that's why I get some oddly colored items at Christmas time. Thank you. So another question I had for you, which I know is something that we do a lot of, we do a lot of Christmas cars. Cards. The past couple years, it's been my job to write out the names on the envelopes of the cards and go through that and when we move, and other people move, trying to keep up with their addresses. But stamps can get expensive. How? What is something that we do with our Christmas cards that you think could other people could do and try to save a few dollars as well, I just try to hand them out in person whenever possible. A lot of our cards go to other families, our friends that are go to school with our children. So I will bring a stack of cards to the Christmas pageant, and I will hand them out there. For the last four or five years, we have gotten our cards from Staples through a deal on Groupon, and I do a lot of price comparisons, and that's been the cheapest way to get the photo cards for quite a while. Okay, so we hand them out the pageant. We also like the family cards. We usually bring it to the Christmas celebration and put it with the gift for any of the aunts and uncles and people we will see in person. We just put it with their gift, versus mailing it to them ahead of time. And I know sometimes we'll bring things with us to either our prayer meeting for people in our faith community or church or however. So the those handing them out add up, because I don't even know, I'd have to google how much a stamp is. So we've been able to save money by doing that, and we don't have to purchase stamps. I don't know what how much stamps have gotten to it's almost like 60 cents. I think sounds really close to that. So if you're doing 100 cards, that's 60 bucks, which can be just in stamps, which it can get very expensive. So the last money saving tip, or not, last money saving tip, last question I have for you, just as relates to money stuff around Christmas. So we talked about the gifts and all those types of things. What about the actual cost of like groceries and entertaining? For Christmas, we go to a family celebration for your side. We go to a family celebration for my side. Sometimes we may host one of those. So how do you kind of just overall, not like the small details, not like the intricate details, but just overall. We're talking about a budget for groceries for December. I mean, typically, how much money do you get a month for groceries? I get$450 every two weeks, and that covers all of our groceries, any household purchases like paper towels and toilet paper are also in that sum. So when it comes to holidays, and if I know that even if some year we're hosting the holiday, we will at our budget meeting talk about me receiving a little bit of extra money to help cover those groceries. I also do try to spread out some of the purchases. Like, as I see things on sale that I know we like, like, we really like Brie cheese. If I see Brie cheese on sale in the weeks leading up to Christmas, I will purchase it a few weeks early. I don't need to wait until my the last food shopping before the holiday to go purchase that item. So spreading out the items can help me with just keep as much as I can within my normal food shopping amount. And how important is it to actually look ahead a little bit like that when you've got things coming at you for planning for a Christmas meal, or hosting an event, or sometimes we'll make a lot of pies and bring pies to like Thanksgiving and stuff. So do you how far ahead do you usually look like you don't wait till, Oh, I gotta cook tomorrow. Let me go to the store today and just pay whatever. Right? I'll start to see especially items that can be stored if we hit a sale on butter last year, I literally bought an entire case of butter at once because it was a great price, and I know how much butter that we will use when we start baking Christmas cookies. Besides that, we do also we do, like bake things ahead of time, and we will start baking in early December and free as cookies. So doing things ahead of time that we can will also help just spread out the cost. So we talked about trying to figure out who we're buying gifts for. We talked about how to actually track them and stay under budget. We talked about some money saving tips. You gave us three money saving tips, which was camel, camel, camel. It was Costco, Costco, online, and jungle deals and jungle deals, which were great tips. And then we talked about Christmas cards, where to get them, where you found you check every year. It's not like you're committed to one place, going to Staples, but every year you look for. A deal or a Groupon. And then we talked about just being aware and intentional about your grocery shopping and having a few extra dollars in the food budget, the grocery budget as you approach Christmas or Thanksgiving, and you're trying to, you know if you have to host or bring something in particular. Are there any other kind of cost saving or money saving tips that you can think of related to particularly Christmas that we want to end with today, I will look through Black Friday sales circulars just to compare prices. Another great website or app to use is slick deals. I look at slick deals a lot to see what the best prices are. If you're not exactly sure the specific product you're buying, that website I mentioned camel camel. Camel also has a page that shows you the top price drops in each category. You can just go and see, like a list of toys that the price is low for at that time, and see if there's something that would appeal to one of your children first, needing to find this specific product first, one last thing that I thought of as we're talking that I think could be very helpful, and I'll let you talk about a little bit, but one of the things we'll do is Christmas comes, our kids get gifts from us, and we try to make them practical and not like just a bunch of, I'll say, junk. We do have family members that will buy them stuff, and depending on who and what they get, it can be just a lot of new things in the house. So typically, we'll purge a little bit some of the kids toys and things, and we've had to. We've donated a lot of stuff over the years, when it kind of gets to this time of year, how do you normally tackle that with the kids? I purge their toys when they're not home, okay? And put it in the back of the minivan and hide it so that don't they don't see it leaving, and it's never their favorite toys? No, of course not. It's things that they're not playing with anymore. There might be a little sentimental value, but the four year old doesn't need infant toys any longer. And quality stuff. We have a little bit of some quality stuff, so if we have friends come over with like an infant or something, we've got a few little toys that we can entertain them with. But for the most part, we're donating it. We've given stuff to the kids school. We just did that the start of the year for the pre K classroom, some stuff. So it's not a bad thing to do. The last thing I'll mention that I know we like to do is at our church, we have, there's a giving tree, and so every year we budget. It's not in our budget, necessarily at the beginning of the year, but we in December, we'll add a budget item to our like ALMS giving category, where we set aside some money to help those people in need or less fortunate than us. And as a kid, growing up, we were my family was a benefit. We would benefit from the generosity of people through different churches getting gifts for us. So our our church has a tree, and they have little tags with the kids age and things that they want, and we try to let each of our kids pick a item that will purchase and bring back to the church before Christmas so that they can give them to a family in need. So it's another way of gift giving, very easy to budget for. You know, be careful of the tag you pick off the tree. You can usually see what they're asking for, but it's just a great way to give to those people less fortunate, and also to teach your kids how to how to be generous, particularly around this time of year. Taryn, did you have anything else to share with us today? I had one more thing. Paul mentioned our kids getting a lot of stuff, and that's true. When they get gifts, they'll come home from a family gathering with seven or eight new things. We will not open them all at once. We will set some aside. And if a month or two has come by and they've forgotten about those items, we will add them to the RE gifting pile. Whereas sometimes we will use those word for a gift for someone else, make sure not to gift back to the person who gave it to you. Or we will donate them again to like a toy drive or something, but it the abundance of stuff that you can get can be overwhelming sometimes, so that that's a good let them open the two things that they're most excited about and just set the others aside, or you can also just wait and pull them out on a rainy day. Or if you're snowed in in February, it's more exciting to get something new then then to open all eight things at once. So thank you. Thanks for having me. Yeah, thanks for thanks for coming into my little my studio here, and. And and joining me on the podcast. So hopefully this has been helpful to you. Thank you for joining us today. God bless Thank you for listening to Catholic money talk. I hope you join us again next time, please click Subscribe on your podcast app to get notified of new episodes. God bless you and have a great day. You.