How to make Birthday Bags on a Budget – it can be done!

My son recently had his birthday and a part of me was disheartened by the fact that I couldn’t afford to throw him a birthday party, one where his friends could come. We had family things going on all week but nothing with his school friends.

After talking to him about it one afternoon a week before his birthday, I asked him if he would like to do anything for his birthday on the day besides attend school, He said that he would like to share his favourite things with his school friends. I thought it was a lovely idea so we chatted about what sort of items he would include. After a lengthy conversation I decided we could do some birthday bags, and I hunted around for the best bargains. I was on a strict budget to I checked where things were on offer and started making a list.

So how do you make up a birthday bag?

You need either a birthday bag or a party bag, there are many varieties available online. You can get them usually with a handle so they are perfect for little hands to hold.
I also chose to buy the plastic cones because I didn’t want Oreos to break up and/or go stale in the bags. This worked perfectly to break things up into sections, the Edibles and the Toys.

How do you stick to your Budget and get the best value?

✩ Sabrina’s Top Tips ✩

There are several ways to stick to budget and also find the best deals, here are my tips.
1. Decide your budget and make a list of what you need to buy.
2. How many are you buying for? Sometimes it’s cheaper to buy 50 bags than 20, bare this in mind.
3. Watch out for “lowest price in 30 days” and other useful slogans on offers.
4. Compare supermarkets online before you go out to do the shopping.
5. Use supermarket offers if you have a discount card with them.
6. Visit budget stores and compare the items you have seen online.
7. Always read the online reviews and filter by most recent as well.
8. Bulk Buy – Depending on whether you can reuse an item in the future for something else or even sell the remainder of the items on, bulk buying can be beneficial. (For us the Oreo’s were cheaper to bulk buy and so were the party bags). My son will happily eat any leftover biscuits let me tell you.
9. Work out the maximum you would like to spend, divide that by how many you are buying for, let’s say it’s 20 children. So divide your budget by 20, and you will understand how much it will cost to do a bag per child. Once you’ve made some essential purchases work out what is remaining of your budget and only spend what you have left. It might be that you have to buy a massive bag of sweets and divide them by hand into little sweet bags like I did with the Oreo biscuits.

Think smarter with your money and not buying things simply for convenience.

Why did we choose the items?

Picking for a mixture of genders is always tricky, but I don’t know a child who doesn’t love stickers and sweets / chocolate biscuits. Oreo is the choice because my son has food allergies but luckily he can eat original Oreo. The cars were because they were pull-back and super cool but also a car is gender neutral in my eyes, same goes for the bouncy balls. I asked all the parents (or my son told me) what peoples favourite colours were, and then labelled the bags and added the toys in accordingly. If I had someone who loved Red they got a red tie on their biscuit cone and they got a red car and a red ball. I would’ve loved to have included bubbles too but they would have sent me over budget. You could swap the bouncy balls for bubbles if your child would prefer those.

What did we include in the final bags?

20 Pull Back Cars cost £7
35 Bouncy Balls cost £7
Stickers cost £2.00 (50 sheets)
Oreo Biscuits cost £4
22 Haribo Sweets (Individual Packets) cost £3
100 Sweet Plastic Cones cost £3
40 Happy Birthday Bags cost £4

I divided the stickers between the children’s bags and kept the rest for my own reward charts at home, meaning each sheet only cost me 4 pence. Bargain!

Total Spent: £30.00
Total of Children: 16
Cost per Child: £1.79

I don’t think this was too bad, 16 happy children for less than £30 (as we had leftovers) and it was much cheaper than throwing a birthday party. My son got to share his favourite items with his friends too!

We have also got left over bouncy balls, birthday bags, cone bags, 6 sweet bags and 4 cars. The leftover pieces we can use whenever we like or give away at other occasions.

At the end of the day you can’t put a price on a child’s happiness and my son was over the moon to help me give out these little bags of joy to all of his friends at school, so that they could all celebrate his happy birthday together.

Thank you for reading this blog post today, I hope you have found it interesting and perhaps got a few useful tips in case you ever decide to do bags for your child’s birthday or a birthday party.

I hope I see you here again soon!

✩ Sabrina ✩