This afternoon, Ellen Rogin joined us on Your Caregiving Journey to talk about creating (and sticking to) a holiday spending plan. You can listen to our show via the player below.
During the show, we offered suggestions on how to create your spending plan, how to communicate with family members if your spending plan changes (it’s less than last year, for instance) and alternatives to gifts.
I’d love to know: How will you approach your gift-giving this year? How do you manage your caree’s gift-giving? How will you create your spending plan? And, will you scale back this year?
I actually have been struggling with this for about a month or so.(: For the last 7 plus years, I’ve been keeping track and sending out birthday gifts from my mother, to my siblings, nieces, and my mother’s friends, and sister. Along with this, the same has followed for Christmas. This year I can’t do it. With all the changes in my mother’s health and needs, along with our own changes here, I don’t have the energy to continue this. So…I’m not going to follow birthdays anymore (my brothers’ families and ours’ have not acknowleged birthdays in a long time to each other) and I’m going to cut back to one gift from my mother to each of them at Christmastime. I feel badly, but I will work through that, and try and explain the best I can to my mother. I continue to rest in the fact that family should be all year through, not only on birthdays and holidays, this is a concept that my brothers don’t understand.
Well, now my caree is my husband, so shopping is no different than in the past for me! However, when my Dad was alive, I purchased gift cards for my Dad to give. I gave caregivers $5 gift cards and gave my brothers gift cards for them and their spouse from my Dad. It made shopping very easy. My Dad did request we send each of his sisters something so I narrowed it down to a few things from a catalog and he chose from there.