Holiday Budget Planning with Itsums.com

Good morning friends! I hope you are well and preparing your stomachs for some Thanksgiving goodies!

{disclaimer: this post is graciously sponsored by itsums.com but all opinions are my own}

I don’t know about you but if I don’t plan out my Christmas shopping AND budget I tend to go a little crazy, mostly because I’m not organized or haven’t been keeping up with my purchases. Heck, half the time I will buy sometime for my son, hide it, then forget where it is or if I even bought it at all! Well, I have found a tool that is going to solve this problem for me this year!

I want to share with you a new site that is helping me organize my holiday shopping budget. Itsums.com is an awesome resource for creating visual pinboards for an event or project that keeps up with your pre-determined budget. It’s an easy way to help you understand where your money is being allocated as well as bringing your vision for a gift list, project, room makeover or party to life.

To get started you simply add the itsums bookmarklet to your bookmark bar and create and name your board. Set your max budget then head to the retailer’s site where you will be shopping. When you find the gift or product simply click the bookmarklet to enter any descriptive information you like, including the price, and it will be added to your board and adjusts your budget accordingly.

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I’m using itsums to manage my son’s Christmas list (and Santa’s budget). You can see my list below. I’m able to see my budget, what I have spent and how much I have left. Once I purchase an item I can mark it as purchased so I don’t forget anything.

Itsums also automatically saves the retailers website link to each item making it easier to return when you’re ready to purchase.

And I love that I can easily email the list to my mom with the share button since YaYa will be buying half of the gifts anyway, right?!?! lol

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The site is incredibly user friendly and you know that’s important to me because I’m a huge tech DUMMY!!! Another cool feature is that boards are shared as a community, like other platforms such as Pinterst and Hometalk. User names and budget information aren’t public but you can search other users boards by topic for ideas and inspiration.

You can also hide items from your total to see how they affect your budget or compare multiple boards and budgets. For example if I am planning a room makeover and I have more than one look in mind I can create several different boards and compare side-by-side the look and budget of each.

And this leads me to the reason I’m most excited about this tool! As a DIY/home design blogger I constantly have my hands in lots of different projects. With itsums.com I can create a board and budget for each project to make sure I stay on track. I can’t tell you how bad I am at budgeting my projects so I was thrilled to find this site.

Here is a board I created for a mini kitchen reno that I’m considering this spring. I can quickly and easily save my selections and input my budget which keeps all my information in one place. If I change my mind about a selection I can just delete it and shop around for something else.

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I could go on and on about how excited I am to put this baby to work for my next project but I suppose I’ll let you go check it out for yourselves now :) The site has lots of great features but is not at all complicated use. You can find out more about how it works here.

I’d love to know what you think! How do you manage your Christmas lists and budgets? I’m always on the hunt for more organization suggestions :)

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***Before I take off I want to congratulate Melissa M., the winner of our Blogger’s Favorite Holiday giveaway. You will be receiving all 10 items from us! We are so excited for you and hope you enjoy!***

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Have a wonderful day friends!

siggy

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6 Comments

  1. I’m coming to Liam’s house Christmas morning!!! He is getting some nice stuff!!! Thanks for sharing this site!!

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