As winters progress the air around starts smelling like Christmas. The biggest and the most awaited festival of the year and also marking a beginning of a new year full of new hopes and new earnings. People all rolled up in woollens and socked up in thick socks keep on working and going an extra mile so that they keep rocking around the Christmas tree without racking up the Christmas debt and cautiously doing their spending and savings for the season.
With Christmas comes the ceremony of giving tokens of love to the near and dear ones and irrespective of the age from the toddler to the adolescent up to the youngsters and young adults, middle aged and senior citizens all look forward to receiving presents.
A major percentage of expenses are done on Christmas than any other holiday. Along with this, families who are spread miles apart also plan to travel to the parted family and celebrate Christmas in unison. Besides when families come together extra costs for lots and lots of feasting and new costumes, especially the red ones, also make a huge impact on the pocket. So this time of the year requires a careful planning and budgeting accounting for all the total expenses thereby including gifts and their packaging, the type of the gifts can range from few affordable ones up to the ones a person desires or dreams of, for receiving on Christmas, as well as travel expenses and the grocery shopping’s. Hence to take care of all the needs and expectations and make Christmas a merry and joyful time and jingle some bells one must always have well set out budget.
While planning the Christmas holiday, first of all planning for cost effective gifts, you should always start by checking your motives for buying the presents before you even think of how you’re going to pay for them. All this depends upon individuals’ discretion, as few may regard this a way of trying to impress others while killing your personal finance. Sudha list of everyone that you will need to get a gift for inclusive of your work friends the school teachers and most of all your family members. To create a budget for how much you plan on spending on each person.
Another estimate comes from tracking your spending. The crazy merriment throughout the December often obscures the need for checking in on the budget so you need to track your expenses and don’t end up overspending and ruining this month or next one’s budget. Connect with your bank accounts and try to make transactions from it, so that you can stream straight into financial planning.
Christmas is expensive and around $1000 is the, expected chunk of money spent by Americans so you have to be wise enough to shop all year instead of doing all the shopping at the prime day of Christmas and keep stashing cash into your Christmas sinking fund so that you have money to move on for the extra Christmas celebrations.
Moving ahead one can always have an entirely different view of the big festivals. For some people it’s just a together time which is valuable over accessories, its the thought that counts.
An attractive Black Friday is the most usual platform for all the people to do their Christmas shopping. Hence in order to avoid gigantic expenditure just round all the festivities, beginning from the end of autumn, it is always mindful to spread out the spending all the year long and taking advantage of the coupons and vouchers you get during that time, saving them for the Christmas gala.
A cardinal saving ground is shopping online from the very convenience of your couch. As you roast chestnuts on open fire, you can order multiple items ranging from your households to your clothing, the gifts and sometimes even including you’re travelling packages, can be bought from the cheapest online stores providing magnificent discount deals. A major advantage of online shopping is that you can crosscheck the price among multiple stores without even putting on real pants. A leverage on the gift cards, promo offers are a real help while planning your Christmas budget.
Cash in hand is always a contingency plan to undertake any unanticipated expenses during the holiday season. So it is not always that bad to take up a payday loan or a personal loan to cover up your financial status. Payday loans are always there to overcome your Christmas spending and there is always an option of paying the amount back on your next payday without any extra fees accrued.
Further one can always have the option of selling some of the items at home which can fetch you good sum. So clearing off old stuff and earning money in the process is wisdom.
Another recommendation is always that if you are able enough make extra cash to cover the extra costs of Christmas, so while people are busy travelling for holidays and wrapping the gifts in the community you can always move into some side hustles like driving for Uber, delivering food and groceries and picking up holiday hours at a seasonal job besides babysitting, pet sitting and if you are unable to get out of your home ,getting paid for simply wrapping the gifts for your neighbourhood families or for people with lack of time to look into such wrapping details, are a wonderful options.
Bigger the festival, greater is the chance of relatable expensive traditions accompanying it .Suitably, cutting down on expensive traditions ,like making a 20 layer authentic German chocolate cake for Santa or purchasing the overpriced annually released WaterFord crystal ornament as a part of your ancestral tradition, you can save a lot and focus more on the joys of the season.
BOTTOM LINE:
Therefore, although not the end, a little elbow grease to have an extra income, a kind and generous employer ,amiable employee- employer relationship, a worthwhile lender and a well organised economic portfolio with automated withdrawals to a different checking account monthly to know your savings before December, a loving warm family which understands the deficiencies and a resourceful community, along with several thoughtful ways of spending and saving money; are going to mitigate all the stress and make you enjoy the festival of Christmas merrily.
