Page 30 2025 Home For The Holidays Lincoln Daily News your kids. If your kids are coming home for the holidays, chances are they are adults or students. It’s time to get out the decisionmaking skills and get to work. Most people will stop giving gifts when the kids move out, but are they still in college? Are they working full time, but struggling a little bit, are they married and doing well? All this is good to take into consideration, but if you have more than one child you still need to treat them equally. Set a goal of a monetary amount and a timeline and involve your children. Do you pay for books for the school year, pay for 2 months rent, pay for a monthly bill, give a gift card for groceries, pay for a year’s worth of oil changes, or give a gas or a meat locker gift card? By concentrating on gifts that would help the kid or family all year long, you can still be equal but cater to each child and their situation. • If you are talking about an adult child and family, day passes to a theme park, tickets for a family movie and popcorn, new games for family game nights, coupon for haircuts for a year or help the parents out by picking out a larger gift for all the kids such as yard playset or trampoline. The different possibilities are endless, but the most important is to communicate with your adult children about what would help the family the best and put parameters in place going forward for all the kids and grandkids. Because as you grow older and your funds are reduced, having this in place and having the ability to discuss it each year will reduce your stress level. • Do all your normal cleaning of the house or hire someone like a cleaning service for a few hours, a teenager, neighbor, grandchild, or friend to help with the cleaning. Cut out polishing the silver and use plastic wear (it has come a long way in recent years). Cut out cleaning your room or rooms that no one will go into like the basement and extra bedrooms. • Decorating brings back a lot of memories for you and your kid(s) and is a great way to introduce your grandkids to old stories and family traditions. However, cutting back
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