How to pay for Christmas gifts, by spending no money.
Tis the season of gift giving, and were due with baby #2 in December so, this is how I got our families Christmas gifts, by spending no money.
Maybe I shouldn’t say NO MONEY, because nothing in life is free. But, I spent zero dollars out of our pockets but still got our son, daughter and my husband some bad ass gifts for Christmas.
Let me start by saying, I started this process in August.
I am a stay at home mom, so I really have no income of my own. So thinking about another baby on the way, due 10 days before Christmas was STRESSING me out. I decided to get clever, and think about what needed to get done around our house in preparation for our daughter, and also think about things I needed to purge to make room.
Our garage has been a disaster zone since we moved in, and cleaning that out and going through all the boxes has been on our list of todo’s for about 6 months. I forced my husband to start the garage journey with me one weekend, and it sparked my Christmas money idea.
As we went through boxes, I kept finding things we NEVER used, forget we had or decor from our previous apartments and home that just didn’t fit our new house vibe.
Introducing: Facebook Marketplace.
I jumped on Facebook and started to post random items to our buy sell trade local pages, and quickly I started to move items. Once I started to sell a couple things, I started to keep track of my items, how much they were listed for and how much I sold them for on an excel sheet. In total I had 56 items total listed, JUST from cleaning out our garage - this was stuff that literally hadn’t been touched in over a year and a half at this point. There was no reason to keep it.
Of the 56 items I have sold 24 items, all for asking price (the trick here is, I priced to sell) and I have so far made $555 from just those 24 items. My potential sales, if I sold everything I am listing for asking price is $1,135.
I already have purchased some Christmas gifts that I stalked online or found deals on, and I tracked that spending on the same excel file to ensure I wasn’t spending too much on one person and that I never was going over the amount that I had sold.
So far, I have only had to spend $270 which includes 5 gifts for Sawyer, 3 gifts for Sloane (who will be BRAND NEW), a gift for Travis and then factoring misc. other gifts for friends & family. That means I still have about $285 left to either put into savings or use for emergency funds. The $285 is from what I have already been able to sell. There is still opportunity to sell the remaining 32 items for an additional $580.
Even if I wasn’t able to sell any more items that I have listed, that is $555 that I did not have before that I was able to use to spend on gifts this year.
My advice to you, figure out things that you need to purge every 6 months and sell them on Facebook marketplace…but price them to sell. Don’t try and get greedy with your items, the lower you price ($10-$15) the quicker your items will move, and if you have a lot like I did it all adds up very quickly.
Let me know if you end up using this trick, and how it worked out for you!
-AG
Here is a screenshot of my excel file to get an idea of how to track-
