What percentage of your income?

[Thingsthatgo]

DH and I disagree about how much money to spend at Christmas.
I estimate that we spend £1000 in total at Christmas, including all gifts, food, outings, giving to charity etc.
our annual income after tax is approx £50, so we spend 2% of our income on Christmas.
How does this compare?

Including a weekend break, day trips, presents plus all food and drink we will have spent approximately 3% of our income.

No idea. Which means it's probably not a big chunk of my income.

Anything between 2-3% although my christmas spending has not changed even when we were earning less- obviously the % was higher then. My DC are 18 and 17 now but have only ever had gifts and clothes etc for birthdays and Chrismas rarely would they get anything outside these times.

We spend around £1k too which is just under 1% of our income. I expect we’ll spend more as our DC get older though, they’re very little at the moment.

We spend about £500, works out a lot less than 1% of our income.

We avoid expensive days out over Christmas because it's not our cup of tea. We also don't go crazy on presents for family and we only have one DC.

I'd say we spend somewhere between £1500-£2000 between us, split over presents, experiences, food, decorations etc.

It's around 2% of our combined pre tax Annual Income.

I dislike sitting and working out how much it costs 😂

Gosh, nowhere near that much.

About £500 total?

But there's only 3 of us.

I think it's easy to underestimate how much you spend as some will be swallowed into weekly grocery shopping and then you might have drinks with work etc.

I think when DC were in in peak cost years (late primary, teens) or was easy to spend at least £1k each on gifts. I have 2 DC and then when you add in food, trip out to panto, nice meal out etc I don't think you'd get much change from 3k. Like a PP, mine got big ticket items like consoles or laptops and fancier clothes on birthday or Christmas only and they didn't get gifts other than the odd tenner in a card from anyone else. No grandparents. Our income varied but I guess you could say it was just under 1 month income, saved for throughout the year.

They are adults now and we spend less on Christmas, probably we'll under £1k this year, but one DS just finished uni and the other still at uni so supporting much more during the year.

We probably spend about £2k. Which is around 2-3% of our take home.

But that's everything - presents, Christmas period food and drink, work Christmas parties and outfits, decorations, gift wrap and cards etc

My husband has a smaller family his side, so spends more per person and prides himself on being a very good gift giver.

My family is much bigger, but I'm a higher earner than a lot of my family, so I like to give the kids something decent rather than a £5 token present.

In total we buy for 19 kids including our own, each other, 3 parents, 2 siblings (some we agree not to buy for), 5 couple presents, 1 friend, 2 dogs and chocolates/booze for our immediate reports at work

It's high this year as we are having a festive disneyland paris break which I'm including as part of our "festive activities" as we come back the day before Christmas eve

Other festive days out, presents for family including my 1 dc
A meal at a resturant christmas day

4500 which is 4%

About £500, which is about 0.5% of pre tax income. That includes a trip to a local show and food. We have 4 kids but don’t buy many presents.

I currently spend about 10% of my income made this year (use to be 5% but Im making much less now due to life circumstances) but I'm low income anyway so that still a lot less spent than most on here.

Don't know what DH spends of his income.

Any under 100k earners here?! 🤣

I only buy presents for my children so maybe £500 depending on if it's a "new electronics" year.

We then have one treat day out - this year a train trip; plus we love the panto. So maybe £100 there if you include food etc.

Then a bit of extra food shopping (although not cheap nowadays!)

So about a quarter of one months wages. (But I spread it out.)

Post tax household income is approx £120k with 2 kids and we spend £500 on presents, £250 on panto + lunch + xmas markets day trip, and an extra £100 on Xmas groceries. We aren’t material people and try to be thoughtful with what we buy. I don’t see the point of spending lots of money on xmas, would rather spend less at Xmas and have a little more to spend in the summer when we can get out and about.

I don’t buy decorations as we bought some a few years ago that are fine to be reused. We will make a few with the kids eg snowflakes, paper chains, gingerbread house but that doesn’t cost much and is a nice thing to do together. We invested in a nice artificial tree a few years back so we don’t buy a tree either.

I use to make 12k but now half that at 6k... DH makes 18k to give us a household income of 24k (a decent amount, I know many on less). We don't struggle at all, no debt and lovely Xmases (not everyone gets a £1000 new Iphone lovely but plenty of gifts for the kids etc...).

I struggle to imagine having 100k income. The house we are currently mid way through buying (the biggest purchase I will ever make) cost less than that. Even if you took 25k off 100k to live as we do now (rent, bills, food and even our birthdays and xmas costs, holiday etc...) you could still buy a house with the remaining 75k. Imagine being able to buy a house as a xmas gift if you really wanted too... its quite mind blowing.

Must be nice.

We probably spend about 1%

£800 ish on gifts and £400 on food/booze
A bit more here and there on activities eg theatre tickets £60 and Santa visit £30.

Probably about 5-7%. I buy presents throughout the year and we go all out with decor, big meals leading up to the day etc. We're a high income family so I realise this is unattainable for most.

@AlltheFs mines around that too and similar income

@housethatbuiltme where do you live that you could buy a house for £75k? You couldn't buy a 1 bed flat around my way (not London) for that.

Also, we make over £100k annually combined but absolutely could not spend £75k on a whim. In the same way that I don't expect you would be able to buy a car for £18k as a Christmas present?

I'm open to tips on spending less though! I do spend too much money, really.

We go to the local Christmas lights switch on, I have a couple of Christmas Fuddles I’m going to. I used to do the flowers at Church but we have silk arrangements now as so expensive. I make Christmas wreaths from greenery from my own and a friends garden. We have a look round the closest city Christmas market with friends and visit the Christmas tree festival in another city that’s not too far. I volunteer and have just done the Christmas window for the shop and have also dressed windows for friends shops in the past at Christmas. I love doing that. I’m out on a Christmas jumper hike and have a Christmas lunch that’s a thank you to the volunteers for our efforts through the year. Also having a get together on the allotments. So it’s all quite low key and a bit homespun but I’m like that. Our income is about 80k. We don’t spend much at all.

https://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/find.html?searchType=SALE&locationIdentifier=REGION%5E460&insId=1&radius=40.0&minPrice=&maxPrice=70000&minBedrooms=&maxBedrooms=&displayPropertyType=&maxDaysSinceAdded=&_includeSSTC=on&sortByPriceDescending=&primaryDisplayPropertyType=&secondaryDisplayPropertyType=&oldDisplayPropertyType=&oldPrimaryDisplayPropertyType=&newHome=&auction=false

Literally 1,975 results for properties under 70k in this part of the country right now.

You could literally live our lives spending exactly what we live on for a family of 5 and buy one of those houses outright with 100k annual income. That's just an absolute fact.

No idea how you are comparing it to buying a car for 18k on an income of 24k which would leave us only 6k too live on (rent, bills, food for a family of 5) which I would say is not possible in the UK... I have lived as a family of 2 on 12k but a family of 5 on 6k.

@housethatbuiltme I used £18k as a direct comparison, it being 3/4 of your annual combined income in the same way that £75k would be 3/4 of our combined annual income.

I think it's brilliant that you can buy such nice houses for a good price in your area! Houses like that are £350k-£400k where I am.

FWIW though, we still couldn't buy a £100k house in cash, It's our gross income, we're taxed up the wazoo because of it, and have/had student loans on top of that. We both take home around half of our gross income each month.

I think this just highlights the difference of the cost of living in different areas.

I don't know what we spend - too much. Just worked out what 3% of our annual salary is before tax and I'd say it's closer to 2% though.

My net household income is about £35k, and I save £150 a month t towards Christmas (presents for my 3 children, my mum, niblings). It also covers festive treats for my kids such as grotto visits, illuminations, circus or panto etc

About 5%?