Holiday Gifts - Get Ready to Buy

Some of you may have already started shopping. Great! Tell us your tips and suggestions in Comments so that we can learn from you.

Yesterday, we worked on prioritizing our lists and writing down the due dates for each item or task. Today, we'll take our Gift List to the next step.

Assignment: Get ready to buy priority items on Holiday Gift List (10 minutes)

1. Starting with your priority items and the earliest due dates. Will you be buying these items at a store, hand-making the gifts, ordering from a catalog, etc.? If you haven't filled in that info, go ahead and finish that now, including the name of the store or catalog, etc.

2. Think about and start to pull together the supplies and resources that you'll need before you shop: Do you have catalogs, ads, coupons, previous gift cards, etc. that you could use to buy these items? Are you using a certain credit card or a Holiday Club account that you need to transfer money from? Take 5 minutes to jot down what you need.

3. Take the next 5 minutes to find these things and put them together in one spot (in your folder or notebook binder that you've been using for your Holiday Planning so far). If you haven't been using a folder or notebook, see if you can find one to start using now. If not, do you have a large, clean 1 gal. ziplock bag around, that you can use to put your stuff in for now?

4. Also see if you can find an envelope to use for your Holiday receipts. Use whatever you have on hand, or recycle a used envelope from your mail. Label the envelope "Holiday 2005 Receipts" and put it in your planning folder/notebook, with the other things that you pulled together today.

STOP for today. Don't forget to let us know in today's Comments how you're doing!

See you tomorrow.