With $5, You Can...

Get a one year subscription to O, The Oprah Magazine. That's a savings of $42.40/year! If you have any Amazon gift cards from Swagbucks, the cost to your personal pocketbook is nothing. Just another way that Swagbucks is making our holiday a little bit more financially manageable!

It's MEGA Swagbucks Day! :)

Don't forget that every Friday is Mega Swagbucks day! Every Friday you can earn anywhere from 10-100 bucks from one search! Pretty nifty. Swagbucks is helping me save Christmas this year. I love the $5 Amazon gift cards (45 Swagbucks), but they have a lot of other great prizes. Are you on Swagbucks yet?

Christmas Emergency: How We're Doing it

Our guinea pig is in surgery today. This surgery is essentially wiping out the funds that we had set aside for Christmas. However, this does not mean that nobody will be getting gifts! Here's a few things we're using to make our limited budget go further:

1. Swagbucks- I knew I was saving them for a reason! One of the prizes (for 45 SwagBucks) is a $5 Amazon gift card. Getting 45 bucks takes me about a month of my searching (about two searches a day). I get more through my sign ups, and you can too! If you're not on Swagbucks, you're missing out!

2. Serendipitous Kohl's giftcard/coupon: We recently made a major purchase at Kohl's during their "Spend $50, get $10 in Kohl's Cash" promotion. (Now expired.) We had $50 in Kohl's cash to spend. I combined that with sales and a 15% off coupon I had, and managed to get gifts for three people with very little out of pocket. Awesome!

3. Yard Sale/Thrift store finds: I shop all year, and have a few gifts already from yard sales and thrift stores. You can find a lot of new in box things if you keep an eye out.

4. Paperback/DVD/CD Swap: I come from a family of readers. Paperback Swap is providing several of our gifts this year for free! Go here for more info. You can also use your Paperback swap credits for DVD Swap and CD Swap if that's more your thing! If you have no credits, you can buy them for a small fee. Depending on the item you're getting, it may be significantly less than buying new.

5. Ebates: I do most of my shopping online. Why have I just discovered Ebates? You get a percentage of your purchase back (ranging from 1-21%) in cash! I've ordered a few magazine subscriptions through them for gifts, and bought a few other planned items. It's not much, but even a little bit is something! Have you signed up with Ebates yet?

6.. Suspending "our" big gifts, celebrating another time. My husband and I are not big on gifts anyway, so we agreed to limit our gift giving to $5 a person. I've gotten him several things through Paperback Swap and a few small things. I've postponed the big item I'd like to get him. (Which I'm not naming just in case he's reading this! Hi honey!) Christmas is more than just gifts, and we can postpone that for now.

Budget 911: Christmas Budget Emergency!

Our Christmas budget (and then some!) has been eaten by a furry friend...our guinea pig, to be exact.

A lump that we've been watching with our vet pretty much exploded on Sunday, requiring a costly trip to the vet on Monday. His discoveries were not good- we are going to have to get her a guinea pig hysterectomy (which we figured, based on what we were watching for under his care) and a biopsy to determine if she has cancer. She's also on antibiotics for the time being. We'll know more on Thurday for Friday what direction this is all going to take.

When we took on the responsibility of having pets, we also said yes to the costs of a reasonable amount of care of them. It is absolutely stunning how much vet bills can add up, especially for little animals who require exotic vets. Our dog has cost us far less than our (late) house rabbits and beloved guinea pigs.

Because of the bill that we already have an estimate on for Thursday, we are going to have to drastically scale back Christmas this year. Luckily, several things are already in place that will assure we are able to get gifts for those we're close to without the out of pocket expense.

Stay tuned as we face our Christmas Budget Emergency! It looks like this article came out just in time for us.