The bloggers at Working for Financial Freedom promoted their first Reduce-a-Bill Challenge in October, and they’re repeating the campaign for November. They’d love to have you join their roll call and report in with what you plan to reduce in household expenses.

Here’s the link to the blog post: New Month, New Challenge, The “Reduce a Bill Challenge” continues.

My goal will be to reduce the money we spend on Christmas expenses such as greeting cards, gift-wrapping supplies and gifts (and the related gas expenses from those shopping trips!). I haven’t pulled the shopping list together yet, but I normally do that in mid-November and I think reducing the holiday spending budget is a realistic goal.

How will I do that?

After living in our current home for four years, we’ve pretty much figured out which Christmas decorations look good in our available space and which ones don’t. There are only one or two things I can think of that we don’t have, but would look nice. In the meantime, I plan to weed out and get rid of some no-longer-favorite stuff from the holiday boxes this season.

I’ve already mentioned that I inventoried my stash of gift-wrapping supplies during the weekend and learned I’m not in need of anything except cellophane tape.

We do send out a big pile of Christmas cards. We’re not going to change that tradition. But I’ve got plans to check out that greeting card sale on Christmas cards at Walgreens I mentioned yesterday. If the sale is that good as the flier says, it will be a noticeable savings.

And instead of driving all over Monroe, Toledo, Novi and Ann Arbor to find “perfect gifts” as we’ve done in previous years, we are limiting our shopping trips. With gas prices hovering around $3 a gallon these days, it’s no savings to chase the out-of-town promotions unless unless we have another errand we can book on the same trip. And while we have family reasons to drive to Ohio two or three times a month; our driving habits have changed drastically from previous years when we were out of town as often as twice a week.

So, we’ve decided that most people on our list will get sports fan gear or shirts honoring their favorite college or sports teams, or gift cards to favorite restaurants or stores. The gift cards will help us stay at our targeted spending amounts because if I want to spend $25 on someone, that’s exactly what they’ll get.