364 Days Until Christmas

Now that Christmas is over for this year, you now have 364 days left until Christmas 2009. Have you started your Christmas savings for 2009 yet?

This year I am very happy to be able to say that I stuck to my Christmas budget and all the gifts we gave have been paid for. The money was already set aside to cover it. I have also started my savings for Christmas 2009. Here are some of the ways that we save for Christmas.

1. Start a Christmas Club account and setup an automatic deposit to it every pay day. This way you don't even have to think about it. Even $10 a week gives you $520 in year not including the interest you should receive.
2. Keep a coin jar. It is VERY easy to save up over $100 in a year by keeping a coin jar. This year we had over $140 in our coin jar. We cashed it in at Coinstar for free and sent in for the $10 holiday bonus. To get the free cash in with Coinstar you have to redeem your coins for a gift card so make sure you get it for a store where you can do a good deal of your holiday shopping. We got ours for Amazon.
3. I love to read and tend to read many books a year. I also typically buy my books instead of getting them from the library (very un-frugal of my I know). So once I finish reading the books I sell them on Amazon Marketplace. The money I get from this goes into our Christmas club account. You could also have a yard sale or list items on Criagslist and put the proceeds into your Christmas Club account.
4. Bonus money. This year my husband got a few bonuses and each time we got one we put part of the money from it into our Christmas Club account. So far the bonus outlook doesn't look good for 2009, but if you are one of the lucky few who gets a bonus next year, consider putting part of it away for Christmas.
5. Rebates. By combining coupons and rebates it is possible to make money buying items. Whenever you manage to do this, why not put that money away for Christmas?

So, have you started your Christmas Savings Account yet? What are you waiting for?