ALISON COLLIS Expert Guru

Returning home from countless meetings and negotiating the almighty dollar may not be what life is all about. A Honolulu woman today decided to launch a campaign to improve her family's life by pursuing her lifelong passion. "Writing was always what I was meant to do," says Alison Collis, 32 amidst the bustle of her three children, ages 12, 5 and 3. "When real life kicks in, too many people end up not living their dream in order to survive. Life begins to lose meaning when you've forgotten what you love." We think she just might be right.

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Guidelines to Designing the Right Gift For the Right Person

Want to select or design a gift but haven't found the right gift choice yet? Here's a few tips on criteria to use when finding that perfect something:

Level of friendship - Three categories people fall into are close friends/relatives, distant friends/relatives, coworkers (who may fall between these categories), and acquaintances.

Close Friends/Relatives: As these are people you are closest to, think of their likes and dislikes and when first trying to select a gift first think of their age, gender and other demographic information on them, then narrow it down by a person's character. An example would be trying to select a gift for your sister and husband in their early 30's who live in the suburbs. If you are planning a joint gift make sure the gift has a balance of femininity and masculinity. A gift basket would be a good choice as you could personalize items for both of them in the basket. Separate gifts would require a financial balance as you don't want to offend one spouse. You could split-theme the basket into hers/his. If your sister likes cats and her hubbie likes baseball, you could select several cat items useful in the home (potholders, candleholders, picture frames with cats on them, etc.).

Distant Friends/Relatives: As you know less about them, try to run with demographics first and use what you do know about them to conclude whether you are picking correctly. If you don't know much about a nephew for example, but you know he's about age 12, try looking at sites like etoys.com or kaybeetoystores.com and selecting an age at least one to two years higher than his age. Also look at their categories of most purchased or most popular products. Then narrow down by what you know are his interests. If you have no idea at all, a safe bet is an electronic toy maybe mimicking an ipod or a video game if they have the right console.

Acquaintances - These are the easiest people to buy for. You know the least about them and they probably expect even less from you. For this, go by the current trend. If candles are in, purchase a nice sized aromatherapy one if a female. If a male, gourmet food products including herbs are a nice choice. Or maybe even a mini "male" gift basket including nice things that maybe go with his job or hobby.

Finding a Discounted Personalized Gift

If you're looking for a great quality personalized gift, don't be shy to shop in your local DollarSavers or $1 stores. A lot of these stores have a runoff of surplus gifts that other stores couldn't sell.

1. Do not buy food products unless the person who is receiving the gift is very much into a certain food type like Vegan or any ethnic food. Chocolates unless used on Valentine's Day are a very generic gift.

2. Try to find a unique product within the area of interest: For example, if you know the person likes Africa, try finding something over e-bay that is from Africa and unique only to that country. Not something you might find right here in the U.S. Do a quick online search for that area of interest suitable to the person and try to find something important in that area still within your budget.

3. Wrapping counts. Theme wrapping is great when it can be accomplished. If you're wrapping about an African gift, use brown postal paper and stamp it with henna and brown colors. If you have kids, use them to do this as a project for creating wrapping paper. Tie it with a dyed and/or natural mix of colored raffia as a finishing touch. You could fashion the gift label in the form of a baggage claim ticket. Those types of templates can be downloaded from the internet.

Let your creativity take over. Remember, its not the cost of the gift, its the uniqueness of it.

Getting the Sports Nut a Gift

Getting the "sports nut" that you know a gift should be easy, right? Definitely wrong. This is one of the most difficult gifts you can get as you need to know what is right in this person's "sports world."

1. Find out favorite teams - Which teams appeal most to the person receiving the gift. Firstly, which is his or at times her favorite sport and then find out within that sport which teams are the favorites.

2. Know who they like and dislike - Make sure you know who they like in their "team." Even though they have a favorite team, that does not mean they like every single player in there. Also, know who is popular in that team if you can't find out who exactly they like.

3. Do not buy the generic "autographed" gift or jersey. Most of the time people spend too much money on these items. Go for a unique item with a logo on it. There are a number of new sporting products that have sport logos on them. For conservative buyers jerseys and shirts are good but if you go for this, it's a good idea to buy them a set. Sometimes a household item with a logo may do the trick depending on the occasion. A framed picture or something that can be mounted on the wall is also a good choice.