You're listening to the Girl Next Door Podcast. I'm Erica. And I'm Kelsey. We're two former

next door neighbors and good friends who love a good chat and a good laugh. We're inviting

you to come on in, have a drink, and stay a while. Hey friend. Hey friend. So this episode is all about

holiday budgeting. And in a year where we know that some may be experiencing just some extreme financial difficulties,

we want to be sensitive to that fact.

So we will talk about how we usually handle the financial side of the holidays,

as well as just give some tips for saving money around the holidays, especially this year.

So how do you typically handle holiday

budgeting in your family? All right. I feel like this is a situation where I want to tell you how

ideally it happens, and then I'm going to tell you what happens in real life. I'm going to share

Yeah, I'm going to share. Yeah, I'm. I'm going to share. Yes, exactly. So,

and just in general, I think we do pretty well, but I think we could improve here. So anyway,

what we aspire to do, and we do actually have a separate checking account that is just for

Christmas spending. We instituted that maybe, you know, a few years ago. And so the

plan is we have budgeted a little bit each month that goes into this account so that when

Christmas comes around, we've already saved up everything we need for Christmas. So. And I would say

ideally. Ideally. Yes, ideally. And I would say we always have some in there heading into Christmas, but often it's like during

the year, we needed that new dishwasher, we needed car repairs.

It's just kind of like sometimes that Christmas savings is, you know, the thing that has

to be tapped during the month when things come up.

So just kind of depending on our saving and spending from the year, it depends on how we're heading into Christmas.

And so I will say that it seems like it's often the case that we will carry a little bit of a

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