The College Money Network is helping you celebrate the holiday season with a giveaway! With the economy in a recession, many of us are cutting back on our holiday spending this year, but we still want to have just as much fun. Share your frugal holiday ideas (gifts, party plans, etc.) and earn chances to win one of the awesome prizes we’re giving away just in time for the holidays.
Later this week, I’ll be posting some of my frugal holiday ideas, and so will other CMN members. But for today, I’m sure you just want to hear about the giveaway!
Prizes
- 2 GB iPod Shuffle
- $50 Photofiddle.com Gift Certificate
- $25 Amazon.com Gift Certificate
- One-year magazine subscriptions
- A copy of The Millionaire Next Door
How to Enter
There are multiple ways to earn entries into the CMN Frugal Holiday giveaway. Complete as many as you can to increase your chances of winning a prize! You may enter each way once.
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Leave a comment on this post sharing your frugal holiday ideas. (1 entry)
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Subscribe to my feed via RSS or email. Then send me the secret phrase that appears at the end of each post in my feed. (2 entries)
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Write a post on your own blog about your frugal holiday ideas and link back to this post. Email me to let me know. (Posts you’ve already written count, as long as they were written in 2008.) (3 entries)
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Visit individual College Money Network member sites for opportunities to earn additional entries, similar to the ones you see here. Copying and pasting your comment on multiple blogs will NOT count. (Maximum of 6 extra entries)
How To Win
All valid entries will be assigned a unique number. We will use a random number generator to select the winning numbers. Odds of winning depend on the number of entries received.
All entries must be received by December 15, 2008 at 11:59 PM PST.
Winners will be notified the following day. After all the prizes have been claimed, we will release an official announcement listing the winners.
Rules and Restrictions
- All winners must be 18 years of age or older and live in the United States.
- No purchase is necessary to participate in this giveaway.
- We will choose the winners from the qualified participants. We are the sole judges of adding entries to the list. Plagiarized content, trackback from splogs, spam, and comments containing abusive or inappropriate languages will not be considered.
- To award the prizes, we must be able to contact you. Please leave a valid email address with your comment, or make sure we can contact you through your web site. Your contact information will not be shared with anyone else.
- For certain prizes, winners will be required to submit a physical address to ship the prize. Again, your contact information will never be shared with anyone.
- Prizes are provided as-is, and substitutions may be made at our discretion.
- Winners must reply within 1 week from the time we notify them to claim their prize. Otherwise, they forfeit their prize, and it will be awarded to an alternate.
This year, I’m baking a variety of cookies for the office and packaging them up in colored cellophane. Delicious, homemade and inexpensive.
I don’t know how frugal it is, but I just keep a list of the things my daughter wants for Christmas, and I don’t buy the most expensive things. I do keep track when I buy an item and keep the tally to make sure I’m not going crazy.
Instead of buying gifts for my nieces and nephew, I offer to have a big slumber party at my house with all or some of them. It turns out to be quite special and something we look forward to, because it’s what I give them for birthdays too. We watch movies, make music, eat popcorn and have a great time and I end up saving a lot of money!
I’ve begun giving small plants as gifts and think this will be wonderful thing to continue during the Holidays. Small plants are great idea because they are not pricey (Home Depot is a great place to go), come in variety of choices and if well taken care of, can be enjoyed for a very long time. Also, if you are looking for gifts in the $8-15 price range, Ifind it a refreshing alternative to what may otherwise consist of a Starbucks (insert name of any number of stores)giftcard.
I make my own bows to put a top presents from catalogs I get in the mail. I also joined ebates to get cash back bonuses on online purchases and coupon codes. It has made a huge difference in planning and shopping for Christmas.
I’ll be baking tons of goodies to give away. My husband and I are scaling back our gifts to help a cousin who needs assistance. I’ve also been doing some serious internet shopping for good deals. Very pleased with some of my savings.
I bake cookies, or if the person likes baking I get a mason jar and put layers of the dry ingredients for something and tie the recipe to it with curling ribbon. I’ve also begun to knit stuff for presents. This isn’t exactly a frugal activity, but I’m going to knit anyway and I might as well give the results to people who will actually use them.
Borrow decorations! Most people I know have more decorations than they can use and have been happy to lend them out.
This holiday season with the economy the way it is…for presents I have made presents, bartered for presents, traded for presents…but not bought presents…my children and I made decorations for our house and our tree consists of my children’s drawings through the year (we cut their little handprints out of them and designed it into a tree) and a beautiful star…on top made of construction paper…all taped to the wall…so frugal i think.
lilhottemomma@yahoo.com
I really like using my credit card rewards to get cash for gifts. Another frugal tip is to buy consumable or “experience” gifts, like food items or gift cartificates. While not necessarily low-cost, they will get used and not clutter up the house. Who needs more stuff anyway, right? Great contest. Go me!
This year, we’re once again baking gifts for people who make a difference in our lives by their kindness: our hair stylist, our mechanic, etc.
We’re also trying out recyclable gift bags instead of wrapping paper. And we try to give gifts to honor someone by donating to a charity…
Happy Holidays
I’ll be making fabric bookmarks for the book worms in my life. I got free fabric samples from Freecycle and now I just need to buy the bonding stuff and the cardboard and I’m set.
I’m also using free samples I’ve received to put in gift baskets and then wrap them with a pretty bow and some cellophane.
Synthetic Tree. ๐ You don’t have to buy a new tree every year. I also worked retail part time to save money on certain presents. I have more listed on my site. ๐
–mark–
Magazine subscriptions! I’ve subscribed to several magazines via Ebay (for Seventeen, Marie Claire, Shape, etc.) often for as littlle as $3.95/year. This year, I will be giving subscriptions to my friends and family, at a greatly discounted price.
I bought Christmas-themed tins for 99 cents each at the local thrift shop, and I’m going to fill them with chocolate-chip cookies, baked with ingredients that were bought on sale in November and then frozen. I realize the second part sounds a bit like frugality overkill, but I’m a student, and every saved penny helps.
I had a chat with siblings. We basically had been exchanging equal-value gift cards for Christmas, so we finally decided to stop doing it.
With girlfriends, there’s a small group of us who are pretty tight. Instead of gift-giving, I organized a “ladies’ tea” on an afternoon when we were all available. With busy schedules, having an afternoon together to talk and laugh is worth more than anything any of us could have purchased.
I’m making my grandma a Christmas gift this year instead of buying her one… I’m going to write 365 encouraging things for her to read (stories, quotes, scriptures, things I love about her, ect) and put them in a jar… one for each day of the year!
I am giving framed photographs from the past year – meaningful and inexpsensive! I’ve also done a lot of bargain shopping and have sought gifts that will be useful to the recipient and that don’t break the bank.