Lower budget parents (£150 ish per child) - what are you buying?

[AllYearsAround]

We tend to spend around £150 per child, not a strict budget but feels about the right amount for us.
Interested to know what others with a similar budget buy! It always seems like very much on the low side by Mumsnet standards.

Mine:
Teen - a couple of Star Wars lego sets
Jeans and a shirt
Dressing gown
An under 16s driving lesson
Stocking with sweets, toiletries etc
£20 cash

Tween - squishmallow
Beyblade set
A fitness/activity tracker
Top and trousers
Ticket to a theatre show
Sewing kit
Comic subscription
Stocking with sweets, hair bobbles, earrings

Kiddo - squishmallow
Art set
Baby doll
Board game
Ticket to a theatre show
Teddy
Dress
Book
Stocking with sweets, bath stuff

@lechatnoir my childhood (and so my dcs) sounds much like yours.

My dc would get a main present and a couple of bits (book, cd, clothes, toiletries or sweets). Dd told me recently that her favourite present as a teen was a velvet scarf.

What age are your children?

Nothing wrong with second hand trainers. DS1 has got an impressive range of Vans, Adidas Sambas, Puma running trainers etc, all for about £20 or under from Vinted, all of them clean and barely worn.

But I'm certainly not going to look down on people spending crazy amounts of money on clothes and shoes for their teens- in a year or two they'll be selling them on for a fraction of the original price from Vinted- and we'll be cleaning up! 😆

So, my nearly- 15 year old wants a Vango Banshee tent for Christmas. Winter is not a bad time to buy camping equipment- there are some going for £90 at the moment, they're usually about £160. But that will still be spread over Christmas and his late winter birthday, and I'll get him another couple of bits- headtorch, maybe a couple of months of Spotify Premium.

I guess my budget per DC is about £60, not including stockings.

Second hand shoes aren't a good idea, unless they're only lightly worn.

These are lightly worn. As I said.

I don’t buy Xmas presents for my kids anymore, but when I did and when I buy things for Eid I wouldn’t spend a massive amount for teens. I definitely wouldn’t be buying designer clothes, what a waste of money and I’d rather encourage them not to need to wear labelled clothes. I would buy maybe a video game or two or one year a keyboard.

I’m not sure it would be 40 presents. Last year got youngest (7 at time) tickets for a show in west end plus train tickets, Tower of London entry & hotel. It was toward the £800 end and physically all she had was a second hand pair of old opera glasses.

Genuinely surprised that people think £150 is excessive, I think it's hard to get more than a handful of decent presents for that (not just a load of tat). I am spending £155ish on my 6 year old and much of it is second hand and he definitely won't have piles of stuff or anything like 40 presents like a pp said!

-Electric guitar (2nd hand) £40 this is what he is desperate for!!
-Britains tractor and trailer (2nd hand)£20
-Black panther costume £5 (vinted) and accessories (new from smyths) £25
-hot wheels track (2nd hand) £10
-sports equipment £15
-bop it game £20

Stocking £20 ish.

So 5 wrapped presents! As I won't wrap the guitar...He will be made up with the above! Having said that, I'm planning on spending about 50 on my toddler plus 20 Stocking so do see how it's easier to spend less for really little ones but think once they are at school and have their own interests it's much harder to spend less than £100...

I would like to know this too and what you are buying for this amount?

I spend a lot more than this, I’m feeling like a right dope after reading what some of you are getting away with.

Why is it absurd because it's different to what you do. Ive spent more than £60 on my dogs Christmas. I think you spending £60 on a child is strange to me. Do I think you are Absurd ? No I just think you are different to me.

It always amazes me that people on these threads can't just accept that people are different and enjoy hearing how others do Christmas without being derogatory because it's different to what they do.

I personally have never bought second hand toys or gifts for Christmas and have always spent a lot on gifts. Do I think that someone who does is absurd or ridiculous, no just different.

Is it? I don’t think it’s nothing but for plenty of people it’s not a massive amount of money.
We went for a pub lunch this weekend and that was £90 for 4 of us add a trip to the cinema with popcorn and parking and we’d spent £150. It’s the kind of thing many people would do without it being a particularly special event.

Exactly. Some people seem really out of touch.
My son asked for a hot wheels transporter. Argos sell it for £67! I found it on Very for £58 and had a voucher...but still...! That's more than what some people spend on their child in total. 🤔
I spoke to someone at work today and they mentioned buying a games console like a Gameboy on Shein or whatever. I looked it up and it's £6.50 and said over 1000 had sold.
It'll be cheap shit made with questionable ethics and standards and probably doesn't comply with the British standards.
Maybe that's how other folk are spending £50 max but it seems way too low if you want anything of quality.

Not a dope. Funny how the people saying they spend £50 max haven't actually said what they bought 🤣. It's cheap crap from Temu or Shein or second hand from vinted/eBay.

Lol I mentioned te mu and she in and my post was hidden 🤣

My experiences as a kid sound like your DH's, it was only when I got older that I realised mum and dad were piling themselves into debt every year - my mum recently admitted she always went overboard at xmas as she felt bad that we didn't have the same lifestyles as our friends which really caught me off guard.

Anyway fast forward to now, OH and I are lucky to have a comfortable lifestyle but I did make the mistake of going over the top the first couple of years with DD who is now 5. We also have DS 6 months and I've scaled back this year to about £100ish on DD (mainly some Gabby's Dolls house stuff, books and PJs) and about £40ish for DS (mainly token/practical gifts so DD doesn't wonder why Santa hasn't brought anything for her brother). We have a huge family and they will get so much from them too - DD literally has everything she could possibly need and it is getting a bit obscene, she can't even tell you what she wants for xmas because she has so much stuff already so I am trying to fix this moving forwards.

I do personally think this is a bit low budget tho although I am very happy with what I have spent and don't feel the need to spend any more - I was at a birthday party a couple of weeks ago with DD and in conversation with the other parents, they were spending much more on high value items like Nintendo Switches, gaming PC's, etc.

You know Christmas is still 6 weeks away. There is time yet for kids who want a fairly budget item as their main gift, to decide they'd rather have a Nintendo Switch, Xbox or PS5

My youngest with the Christmas Birthday decided to dump that on me the week before Christmas the year he turned 6.
So still steeped in Santa, and not even able to use the get out - Maybe for your Birthday!

Once you've written your Christmas list that's it! No changes

It always fascinates me how different households operate. Would have never occured to me to ask for something like that. Can't really pin down whether I wasn't interested or if it just wasn't the done thing in our household. Nature or nurture consumerism edition?

I have young children ATM (nearly 6 and 3.5). We only wrote a list for the first time last year and top of it was 'sweets and chocolate'. This year my youngest would like a Pokémon pen and a carrier for her doll. Oldest has asked for more Lego, but not a specific set or anything. They're generally very easy to please, which I put down to their ages but then see comments like this and wonder if it's something else.

In my sisters household (kids are all grown now) it was totally normal to have games consoles and the like even when they were wee. Wondering if it's the kids setting the tone or the adults? How are households so vastly different? Can't all be budget based on some of the comments here. Genuinely zero judgement from me, think everyone should go their own way (though environmentally friendly choices would be wonderful tbf!!) but it is interesting!

Mine are all teens and tweens so £150 is pretty impossible (for me). But part of that is because of Christmases when I was a child. We were poor. Christmas and birthday money from relatives disappeared into my mother's purse kind of poor. In October Mum would give us the Littlewoods catalog and tell us to write a list of up to £200 worth of just toys each. (I, liking a bargain, used to look for the cheapest things I liked so I could get more for the money.) Then on Christmas morning, we'd come downstairs to find tons of presents spread out over the couches. Not just the catalog stuff. Clothes too. I think this was to make up for the fact that we got nothing the rest of the year. And it was all on credit which took until the following October to pay off.

These days we are not a poor family, but there is still a part of me that feels guilty that I haven't gotten my children enough because it doesn't cover the furniture, even though I know they get plenty the rest of the year.

My DC never asked for things like that either, they knew I couldn't afford them

Which means the year I saved up and bought them a second hand PS3 (the ps4 had just been released) was absolutely magical.

Dd 11 probably spend around
£120 Once everything is done. So far I have;
Churos maker
Theatre ticket
Harry Potter hoodie
£15-20 on stocking bits

She's at that bloody awkward stage of not really knowing what she wants.

I'm also amazed to see £150 per child described as lower budget!

5 year old eldest children just don't know about games consoles yet 😂

Dd15 says having too many gifts or too much spent on her would result in less meaning in the gifts. Giving for the sake of it rather than choosing something she'd really like and would value. None of my dc have ever asked for very expensive things or a lot of gifts. Ds collects Lego and that's something that could easily equal £1000 with his current wish list but I ask him to choose the set he'd like the most and that's what he does. Dd17 has asked for sneakers.