The Best Holiday Gifts To Give Yourself

The Best Holiday Gifts To Give Yourself

The Best Holiday Gifts To Give Yourself
 

For the next couple of weeks, most of us will be busy trying to find the best holiday gifts for our family and friends to show that we care about and appreciate them. While we are busy making our holiday list, checking it twice and trying not to miss everyone, quite often, we missed putting ourselves on the list. Why aren’t we on the list? We deserve to get ourselves something too, don’t we?
 

So, what do we deserve? What type of gift will provide us the most happiness? A brand new Mercedes-Benz SUV in the driveway? The latest iPhone X with a Grand Canyon size storage space? How about that new 80-inch flat screen TV in the living room?
 

All these materialistic gifts will definitely give us a shot of short-term highs. However, after a couple of months, the new car smell will be wearing off and the new gadgets will not be as exciting anymore. What we’ll be left with are massive credit card bills and the long-term loans to pay off.
 

When we give ourselves any gift, it’s gotta be thoughtful, meaningful and hopeful will provide us a great deal of long-term happiness. Don’t worry, these gifts won’t cost you an arm and a leg. Are you interested to know? Let’s take a look to see which gifts are the best holiday gifts.

Financial Health

Most people will agree with the view that your health is your wealth. On the other hand, I believe the reverse is also true. Your wealth is also your health. You can be the healthiest person in the world, but if you have no wealth, you’ll be trading your health to work on multiple jobs trying to build your wealth.
 

For this holiday, why not put down financial health as a gift for yourself? Build your wealth by improving your financial health. Now, you don’t have pick one over the other. You can have both your health and your wealth.

Financial Harmony

This one is for people who are currently in a relationship. How often do you and your other half have money-related fights? Admittedly, I am not immune to these disagreements and I do have a few money fights with my wife from time to time. I really hate to admit this, but before we got married, we never discussed our money philosophies. When you are in love, you often use your heart to make decisions rather than your head.
 

Both my wife and I are very responsible with our money and we don’t spend frivolously. However, when it comes to managing and growing our money, my wife is just not very interested. As a personal finance blogger, it really drives me nuts because money management is definitely in the top three of my priority list and it’s probably not even on my wife’s list at all.
 

Suffice to say, I had been struggling and had absolutely no success in convincing my wife to be more involved in managing our money. Until recently, I came across Mustard Seed Money’s post about money mistakes that couples make. In my opinion, this post is the perfect financial harmony gift for couples that have not had their money talk yet. Start the conversation today if you’ve never had it.

Financial Reward

Why give yourself just one gift when you can give twelve? Sometimes we feel a little bit deprived as we have a bunch of saving goals but not many spending goals. To prevent the saving burnt out, my wife and I agreed to allocate $100 each on a monthly basis as our financial reward for saving diligently. We get to spend our $100 on anything we want. No questions asked.

Financial Security

If you were to lose your job tomorrow or you encounter some health issues that prevent you from working, how long can you continue to pay your living expenses without inheriting debt? During this period of festivity, no one really likes to make a plan for these situations, but unexpected life events do happen. Anything can go wrong at the most inopportune time. The better prepared you are, the less of an impact any unexpected emergencies will have on your finances.
 

So how do you give yourself the gift of financial security? First off, start small and build an emergency fund of just $500. Once you have accomplished this goal, double this emergency fund to $1,000. Continue to increase your emergency fund little by little until you’ve reached about $8,000 to $10,000 or at least three months of living expenses.
 

By the time you have built a sizable emergency fund, it should provide you with the financial security and comfort level that during most periods of hardship, you have the financial capability to withstand it. Now, if you don’t believe in an emergency fund like I do, you can build access to funds. This method is much more efficient when it comes to having your money working harder to increase your wealth.

Financial Stability

Most people have the impression that if they have a stable job, are making a reasonable salary and are saving a good portion of their income, then they have financial stability. Well, your financial stability only lasts as long as your employment status. To truly have financial stability, we need to build different sources of income and diversify our income streams.
 

For the majority of us, employment income will still be our major source of income. That’s fine, but it doesn’t mean that we cannot build more income streams by having our money work harder for us. The harder our money works now and into the future, the less dependent we’ll be on our employment income.
 

For this holiday, wouldn’t you love to have the gift of peace of mind? Knowing that if you lose your main source of income, not all is lost. You still have other sources of income to sustain your daily life. Here’s a few ideas to increase your income streams in the form of: real estate, stock market, side hustles.

Financial Knowledge

Do you want to get a gift that keeps on giving? Then give yourself the gift of financial knowledge. With this gift, you can choose to pay yourself first, put time and compound interest to work, and best of all, have your money working while you are sleeping. One day, you may wake up and never have to work again.
 

The good news is this gift is free and there is an abundant amount of it. You can open as many of this gift as you want and whenever you want. There is no limit. Did you know that you have already opened one gift by reading this post? There are more gifts from my blog, so feel free to indulge. If you are really greedy, here are the other personal finance bloggers that also provide free gifts too.

Financial Freedom

True happiness comes from the freedom to be able to choose what you can do, when, where and how you can do it. You will no longer need to worry about the next paycheque or if your job will be there next year. This is the ultimate gift that you can give yourself.
 

To start, calculate how much your net worth is now. Tally your annual expenses for this year and multiply that number by 25. This number will be your financial freedom target to increase your net worth to that amount. You can start wrapping this gift now. Here’s a starting point to help you grow your net worth step-by-step.

My Two Cents

If you have been leaving yourself off your holiday gift list, this year is the year to start adding yourself to the list. As much as we want to shower your loved ones with gifts, it’s never selfish of us to give ourselves one of these gifts. Go ahead, splurge on yourself a little.
 

So readers, which gifts on this list do you think are the best holiday gifts to give yourself? You can also give these gifts to anyone you like. They’re just as good for you as it’s good for the recipient.

 

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Leo T. Ly, Money Coach, Personal Finance Blogger/Enthusiast and a Realtor Living in the Markam, Ontario, CanadaAbout Leo
I am a money coach, personal finance blogger/enthusiast and a Realtor living in Markham, Ontario, Canada. I built a net worth of a million dollars over a ten year period. I did it by being a disciplined saver, taking advantage of income tax rules and borrowing money to invest rather than for consumption. I am often excited to take advantage of free money from employers and governments in addition to building more passive income sources. After accumulating my first million dollars, I am now embarking on a second journey towards achieving financial independence. On this journey, I will strive to increase my net worth to two million dollars and retire by the age of 48 - Freedom 48. Come along and follow my journey on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest or Google Plus.



There are 25 opinions expressed on this post.

  1. I Iove everything on this list!

    I’ve been always trying to work on that financial stability but it takes a lot of time and effort to build. I’m always thinking about if one day I lose my job, where and how can I provide myself other sources of income to protect us. Our real estate, stocks, and other forms of side gigs at the moment isn’t enough so I’ll have to find more ways.

    It’s odd that we don’t fight about money that much since we are 90% on the same page. We just fight about other stupid things, like where we should go eat and what fun things to do on the weekend, or where we should go for vacation. *sigh* we’ll have to be in more harmony on those points instead of money ha!

    Btw our Christmas gift for ourselves is killing $20,000 worth of student loans… and we are going to do it within the next few weeks. exactly what I wrote in my latest post, Lol!

  2. Ahhh, finances. I honestly don’t even want to think about them right now. It’s Christmas time, we have kids, and my husband was laid off in October. We are living off of unemployment and savings. Thankful for my blog income to afford Christmas. Something I learned though with all this….always have more savings!

  3. That’s nice that you have a $100 a month to spend no questions asked with your wife. My husband and I have joint and separate accounts so there’s less discussion with our own accounts obviously.

    The gift of knowledge is priceless! It’s hard to convince loved ones to be more interested in personal finance when they aren’t. I guess people have to learn to like it on their own.

  4. Nice list Leo. Knowledge is one of the best things we can get. On the materialistic side i bought myself a 40 dollar fast and furious off road hummer rc car this year. My son wanted a remote car so of course i needed one as well. Got to teach him young, sometimes you lose. Eat my dust! Haha….
    Oh man do I love Christmas!
    Cheers

  5. Financial stability and all that relates to it is definitely one of the best gifts that you can give yourself and your family! And I love how you give yourself $100 money to spend on whatever. Our budget it too tight for that right now (we’re debt free though so I’m not complaining!) but I’d love to be able to do that when our finances loosen up again.

  6. I’ll be giving myself this Holiday the gift of health. My back pain has been nagging me for almost three years now and finally decided to go under the knife a few days before Christmas. Probably not the best idea or timing for everybody but getting it done before the year-end will save me quite a lot due to health insurance deductibles.

  7. Financial Security is really important, my goal for next year is the Financial Freedom. I really want to reach that.

  8. These are some great things, it really does make such a difference to be feeling financially secure and free, rather than worrying about where the money for everything will come from.

  9. My husband and I both said that this is the year we get out of debt and start saving for our new house. We also give ourselves a stipend that we can use however we like. It makes life a little more sane.

  10. Definitely becoming more aware of the opportunities that are out there financially and what I can do with them is so important. I really need to be more financially aware this next year and I resolve to do that for myself and for my daughter.

  11. These are great gifts to give yourself. We have worked hard on our finances over the years. We want to be able to retire early.

  12. Financial Freedom and Financial stability I must say is the two main goals that I am achieving. I just turned thirty and I promise to myself that I need to work out my finances in order to be more liquid in the coming years.

  13. I would love all of these things for the holiday season. Materialistic items are fine for the short term but the long term happiness is what’s most important.

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