If you hate Christmas shopping but love mathematics, you’re in luck. Over at Wired, Garth Sundem has detailed a formula that you can follow so that you spend exactly the right amount of money on each person’s gift. Then you don’t end up buying your brother-in-law a $50 gift and running out of cash before you get anything for your girlfriend.
He says:
1. Define your total budget. Be realistic. For this example, I’m using $500.
2. List everyone for whom you need to buy a gift.
3. Now next to each person’s name, give them an importance rank from 1-10 (10 high).
4. Sum all the people, multiplied by their ranks. It should look something like this 10(wife)+8(kid1)+8(kid2)+3(dad)+3(mom)+1(in-laws)+4(nephew)=37(total)
5. Set your total equal to your budget: 37(total)=$500
6. Solve for (total): total=$13.50
7. Multiply this “total” by each person’s importance to see how much you should spend. In this example, your wife gets 10*13.5=$135, and your kids get 8*13.5=$108.
With only $500 in your pocket, and without time at this point to dilly dally with another shopping trip, you’ll be forced to stick to it.
Of course, this only works if you can follow your budget perfectly. If you instead find the perfect gift for someone but it’s a few bucks higher than you’re “allowed” to spend, it will throw all the other gifts out of whack.
Also, in any realistic universe, finding a gift that is to-the-penny exact on your budget will be much more stressful than shopping in the first place.
I would add some fuzziness. Also, this would be interesting to figure out after Christmas, when you reconcile the receipts, and see how close you come to the ideal budget.
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