According to news reports “Secret Santa” is out in force again this year giving random gifts of cash to those in need.  This is heart-warming news considering the tough times people are facing across the nation.  I’ve been a follower of the Secret Santa movement since I first learned of the idea a few years ago on the Dave Ramsey radio show.

The late Larry Stewart is credited with starting the Secret Santa movement as he passed out over a million dollars in gifts in his 26 years playing Secret Santa in the Kansas City area.  After his death, an army of Secret Santas have taken up his cause.  An excerpt from the AP story provides a great example of the impact even a relatively small gift can make on a person’s life:

Cynthia Brown, 40, was laid off three weeks ago from her food service job. Santa found her at the St. Louis County health clinic and gave her $100, exactly what she had asked to borrow from her mother a night ago to buy food.

“I have three daughters, and I can’t get unemployment yet. I was down in food,” she said.

I imagine Ms. Brown’s life was forever changed at that moment.  Not because the $100 will solve all her financial problems, but because she was blessed by the generous gift of a complete stranger. The Secret Santa letter had but one string attached, and that “is that you do something nice for someone. Pass it on.”

In addition to participating in The One Dollar Give, this year my family is planning a little Secret Santa gift giving mission ourselves, but I can’t give details because then it wouldn’t be a secret!  I encourage you to find a way to perform a random act of kindness for someone else during the holiday season.  It doesn’t have to be expensive, in fact, it doesn’t even have to involve money.  Roll a neighbor’s trash can up from the street before they get home. Take some bake goodies around to neighbors on the weekend. Offer to cook a warm meal for a family going through a tough time. Volunteer some of your time to help a shelter or local charity. The point is to find a way to brighten the holidays for someone else.

I would love to hear your Secret Santa ideas for spreading a little holiday cheer this year.

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After writing about saving for the Christmas holidays, and then publishing an extensive list of frugal Cyber Monday gift ideas earlier this week, I have to admit I felt like even I was a little caught up in the Christmas spending enthusiasm.  Fortunately, the leadership of a couple other dynamic bloggers (Mandi of Doodle’s Place, and Tara of Deal Seeking Mom) helped get me back into the true Christmas spirit.

Mandi and Tara had a fantastic idea to harness the collective power of bloggers.  The One Dollar Give project was launched December 1st, and its mission is to feature a blogger’s favorite charity each day during the month of December.  You can support all thirty one charities by giving just one dollar a day to each of the sponsored organizations.

I jumped at the chance to help with this project, and will even submit a write up about a charity I have had personal experience with this time next week (it will appear on The One Dollar Give site, but I’ll put a mention here to direct readers to their site). 

If you are unable to help financially, there are other ways to show your support.  If you are a blogger, feel free to grab the button in this post (or in my top right sidebar) and put it on your blog.  Maybe you could also mention it on Twitter, or in a blog roundup of your own.

Let’s face it, it has been a rough year for a lot of people, and charities in particular are feeling the pinch. One dollar may not seem like much, but imagine if just half of my subscribers (some two thousand people) pitched in one dollar to help a sponsored charity. I’ve pledged $31 for December by striking a video game purchase from my Christmas shopping list, and may give a little more at the end of the month with what I have left over. 

Thanks for allowing me a day to write about such a special project.  We trade a lot of ideas on saving money and building wealth here at Frugal Dad, and ultimately I hope we are all wealthy enough to give some of it away.  There is no greater joy than helping others, especially during the holiday season.

Photo courtesy of krisandapril

We have recently attended a number of weddings, birthday parties and other celebrations.  With little time to shop for gifts we resorted to giving cash or gift cards in most cases, but from now on I think I’ll opt for simply giving cash.  Here are a few reasons why:

• Cash can be spent anywhere.  Unlike gift cards to specific stores, cash can be spent anywhere.  I always appreciate receiving a cash gift because I spend it in whatever manner I want.  Gift cards and gift certificates do not provide the same flexibility.

• Cash can be used for things other than spending.  Depending on what stage you are in of your financial turnaround, it might make sense to hang on to the cash gift, or use it to pay down debt.  In the past I have considered selling gift cards on eBay (for slightly less than face value) just to get the cash value to apply towards other goals. Newlyweds may be particularly appreciative of cash gifts to cover honeymoon expenses.  In fact, cash has become such a popular wedding option in Israel that couples are renting ATMs that allow wedding guests to transfer a sum of money in the newlywed’s bank account with the swipe of a credit or debit card.

• Gift cards may get lost. I am notoriously bad at keeping up with gift cards, and the remaining balances. If I toss the cash gift in a separate envelope I know exactly how much of the gift is left by simply counting the money.  That’s a lot easier than calling a 1-800 number and wading through a sea of voice prompts.

• Giving cash to kids helps reinforce spending lessons.  It is true what they say, spending with cash hurts.  When you hand over that $20 bill you got in your birthday card and get three pennies back it registers.  When you swipe the same amount on a gift card it just doesn’t create the same kind of mental lesson of separating you from your money.    What a better time to reinforce this lesson than when kids are young.

• Gift card balances are rarely fully redeemed.  Of course, this is primary reason retailers offer gift cards.  Unused portions of gift card sales eventually add to the company’s balance sheet.  Best Buy compiled its gift card redemption statistics and found that of its unused gift card balances, the average card had been held and not redeemed for about 2.2 years.  It’s probably safe to say the majority of those balanced will never be redeemed.

• Some gift cards and gift certificates expire with little warning.  I gave my wife a gift certificate for a day at the spa a couple Mother’s Day ago, along with the promise of keeping the kids out of her hair and letting her enjoy a day of pampering.  It was a while before we scheduled the spa day, and were disappointed to find out the gift certificate had expired the month before.  Fortunately, after talking with the spa owner she was still able to use it, but it made me recognize that if I had simply paid for the spa day on the day she visited we would have not had to worry about expiration dates.

Would you rather receive cash or a gift card?

I finally caught up on my TiVo recordings over the weekend. I watch exactly two television shows now, Lost and CSI. With Lost now going on an extended break, and CSI still gearing up for new episodes, I decided to record some new shows and give them a try. Oprah’s Big Give seemed to be a show I would like based on its premise of giving away money for good causes. It looked to me to be sort of a reality show for Secret Santas.

The first two episodes were about what I expected, but as the stakes were raised and the dollar amounts increased, I became more disappointed with each new show. In the March 23 airing contestants were asked to give away $100,000 in twenty-four hours. The stipulations were you could not give away more than $500 to any one person, or $10,000 at any one location, and you could not simply give away cash.

I was surprised when none of the contestants visited local churches, hospitals or social services offices. These seemed like obvious places to look for people who are hurting, emotionally, physically and/or financially. Most churches have a long list for their benevolence funds, and not all of them are requests for cash money. Many families need help making a car payment, or getting their mortgage caught up just to get back on track. Others may be recovering from a serious illness and are buried in medical bills, or have experienced a disaster such as a house fire or flood and have lost all of their belongings.

Many municipalities are closing city pools and recreational facilities because of a lack of funding and dilapidated equipment. I can just imagine a local Boys or Girls Clubs in Miami would have loved to have received a new basketball goal, or other updated recreational equipment for their facilities. Orphanages are frequently in need of linens and meal supplies to care for young people in their charge. Soup kitchens and shelters struggle to keep staples such as flour, bread, meats and rice in stock. There is no shortage of stories of victims of Hurricane Andrew still living in homes in need of repair, fifteen years after the hurricane blew through Miami. $10,000 would have gone a long way at each of these places.

Instead, some contestants bought groceries for random shoppers, gave away flowers at an intersection ($2,000 worth), and donated pet food and supplies to an animal shelter. These were all noble deeds, but I thought the name of this game was Big Give! These contestants were guilty of thinking small.

I was once part of a corporate initiative to implement a process improvement plan throughout the company. Our trainer had us perform an exercise in the very beginning of the 6-week training course called “think BIG.” Basically, each team was given an idea and told to expound on it as many times as we could in ten minutes. My group received the task, “Start a youth sports program - your existing budget is $0.00.” We started frantically throwing out ideas and capturing them on a worksheet. Separating each line on the worksheet were the words, “think BIGGER!”

After completing ten or eleven lines we had a strategy to start a youth football league sponsored by area businesses and local sports teams. A new stadium would be built using a combination of public and private, corporate-sponsored funds. Concession sales and banner advertisements lining the playing fields would pay for ongoing maintenance. Not bad for ten minutes of brainstorming. However, if the words “think BIGGER” had not appeared under each idea we might have stopped with “sell Krispy Kreme donuts to raise some money.”

Most people stop thinking big somewhere along the way. We all settle into our lives and outgrow those big dreams we had as a kid. I’d encourage anyone reading this to “think BIGGER” when imagining what we could do collectively to help other people. It’s easy to sit in my living room and play armchair quarterback, but I would like to think if I had a chance to give away $100,000 to people in need I could find more worthy recipients.

Image Credit: Daily News