What DIY gifts really cost
DIY Christmas gifts are a great way to show friends and family how much you care about them, but they can also help you cut down a bit on your Christmas spending—provided, of course, that you make sure that the cost of the project doesn’t get away from you. There are three important variables to consider when thinking about the actual cost of that hand-knitted sweater or custom-painted pair of shoes, and you can only really call a homemade gift economical if taking all three into account still results in an acceptably reasonable dollar amount.
Materials
With a few exceptions (mainly virtual goods like digital paintings, handpicked playlists and the like), you’ll need some materials to make your gift, and those will cost money. Not only that, but you may need access to certain tools that you don't already have, which will also cost money. You should also always account for just a slightly larger amount of supplies than you expect to need since this will give you some much-needed margin for error.
Don’t assume that you know what the sum of those expenses will be—sit down and calculate them using well-researched estimates. This will give you a general idea of the core cost of your gift, but there are even more costs to come.
Labor
It might seem silly to factor this in, but it’s a fundamental part of Economics 101: when choosing to devote your time to something, always consider the opportunity cost of doing so. If you spend 20 hours making your gift when you could have spent those 20 hours working at $10/hour, your gift actually cost you an extra $200. With that in mind, you could easily come out ahead on your Christmas spending if you worked those 20 hours and bought a gift rather than made one.
However, this only applies in cases where you have a reasonable chance of commanding a wage for your time. If you’re unemployed, can’t get any more hours at your job, and can’t think of small side jobs to bring in some cash, you can’t put a direct monetary value on an hour of your labor because you probably won’t be able to earn money with it. In that case, your only limit is how much time you’re willing to sacrifice.
Potential for Failure
Before you start your project, ask yourself: am I going to need multiple tries to pull this off? Whether your skill fails you or an unfortunate accident occurs, many things can go wrong in the process of creating something. If you’re an expert artist painting a piece in a dedicated, secure studio space, the chances of you needing to completely restart your project are very slim. If, on the other hand, you’re a hobbyist trying a new craft for the first time, you can bet that things won’t go exactly the way you want them on your first attempt. You may find yourself needing to reinvest all that time and money on a second try, or even a third or fourth. For this reason, projects that take you into uncharted waters should be considered more expensive than those that let you work in familiar territory.
Failure, in this case, doesn’t just apply to the construction of the gift itself, though. A DIY gift isn’t something you can run out to the mall to pick up last-minute. If you run out of time, you might end up just buying something after all. If you’re going to keep your Christmas spending in check, you must consider how likely it is that you can actually pull it off.
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