Although we’re only technically a few weeks into summer, it is almost back to school time for the kids. The kids start 1st and 4th grade on August 9 and this year, for the first time, we have decided to set a budget for our back to school shopping. Quite a bit went into this decision and so I wanted to share with you how we went about creating our back to school shopping budget.
School Supplies
The kids’ school will have a back-to-school supply list that each student needs to purchase prior to the start of the school year. This includes items like tissues, paper towels, pencils, crayons, etc. All of these supplies are pooled together and not reserved for our kids, specifically.
Unfortunately the state’s public education budget keeps getting cut and so these expenditures are a necessity. I don’t mind helping out because if we don’t buy these supplies, as parents, then teachers foot the bill. So we took this into account when setting our back-to-school shopping budget and decide to not include these items in the overall budget and instead just incorporate them into our monthly household budget. In other words, the kids won’t have their funds for clothing, shoes, etc reduced by the mandatory school supplies list.
What to Include?
Now that we’ve decided one thing that wouldn’t fall under the kids’ individual back-to-school shopping budget, we had to decide what to include. Since we live in a warm weather climate, back-to-school clothes consist primarily of shorts. Jeans or pants aren’t usually worn until late October and inevitably the kids will have outgrown whatever was purchased in July and August. So this year’s back-to-school shopping budget will include the following items:
- Shorts and skirts
- Short-sleeved shirts
- Novelty socks
- Hair accessories
- Shoes
We will have a separate clothing budget for cool weather clothing – long sleeved shirts, pants and jeans, and jackets.
Determining the Budget Amount
When determining how much you should spend on back-to-school shopping it is important to look at several things: your income, your debt load, the age of your children, etc. Our kids are young and so clothes are less expensive. Our debt load is high but our income is also high. So our basic dollar amount may be higher than some and lower than others but the percentage of our overall monthly income is low. The amount we’ve set for both kids, combined, is about 5% of our take home pay.
As is the case with everything related to budgeting and personal finance is that the personal part of the equation is huge. While the decision is personal, it is important that you research all of the factors in this article prior to setting your back-to-school shopping budget.
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