The holidays bring a unique complication to smartly managing your finances.  Budgeting for things like bills is easy, you just tally them up and you’re good to go, but things like fancy dinners and gifts are a different story.

One of the best tools you have for managing your personal finances is your own history.  My family uses the hash tagging feature of Smart Notes to hashtag all of our holiday spending as either #thanksgiving or #christmas.

We do this every year so we can easily look back at the previous year, and see what we spent last year, and use that as a baseline for the new year.  A quick search for #christmas lets us know how to budget for the year.