10 Tips for Budgeting Your Holiday Season

While the holiday season is a time of joy and celebration, it often has a significant impact on our finances. As holiday expenses – food, gifts, travel, and more – continue to rise each year, effective budgeting is essential to maintaining financial health into the new year.

We Have Compiled a List of Budgeting Tips to Help You Survive the Holiday Season.

1. Get a Head Start

Did you know that 48 percent of Americans kick off their Christmas shopping before Halloween? While some people think the holiday shopping season is starting earlier every year, there is a reason why. If you wait until the last minute to begin holiday shopping, you risk losing out on the best deals, ample shipping time, and experience a higher financial impact to your wallet. Other benefits include:

• Wider selection
• Exclusive deals
• Reduced holiday stress
• Better planning
• Improved shipping times
• Opportunity for price adjustments

The earlier you shop, the better chance you have at stacking discounts and staying within your holiday budget.

2. Set Spending Limits

A good way to approach the holiday season is to set spending caps on your holiday shopping. First, look at your regular monthly budget, what are your everyday expenses for food, bills, and other necessities? Once you have a clear idea of how much you need to set aside, start adding in how much you expect to spend on presents and other holiday items. If you’re not sure, use last year’s holiday spending as a realistic reference.

Once you have your spending limits, it will help you set expectations early for how much you can afford. For example, you might decide to give four gifts to each of your kids, all totaling a certain amount. If your kids know this ahead of time, it might prevent disappointment Christmas morning. Additionally, if your budget doesn’t allow you to buy gifts for all of your family and friends, you can communicate early on, agreeing on price limits or not exchanging gifts at all.

3. Prioritize Bill and Other Essentials

It is important to prioritize your monthly essentials over your holiday nice-to-haves. There are plenty of memories you can make during the holidays that don’t revolve around money or gifts. Try to curb impulse buying and set aside money for your most important items – rent/mortgage, utilities, insurance, loans, and so on. Try sitting down with your family or friends and come up with ways you can spend time together this holiday season. These experiences may be more fun, less stressful, and easier on your budget!

4. Take Advantage of Holiday Sales

As the holiday season approaches, pre-holiday sales – such as Amazon Prime Day, Walmart Deals, Target Circle Week, Labor Day sales and more – offer consumers significant savings. These events allow consumers to shop early, stretch their budgets, and reduce holiday stress.

5. Track Your Spending as You Go

You do not want to make a holiday budget and then fail to track your spending. You can do it the old-fashioned way by saving receipts or handwriting them on a piece of paper. Or, you can automate it with an app on your smartphone.

6. Shop Online and Compare Prices

Online shopping allows you to compare prices, access a wider selection of products, read reviews and research without ever leaving the comfort of your home. Plus, many retailers offer free shipping and returns during the holiday season.

8. Manage Credit Card Use

Consider using a single credit card for all holiday purchases, making it easy to track spending and prevent overspending. It’s often tempting to defer payments during the holiday season by using credit cards or buy-now-pay-later options, however, use this with caution. Taking advantage of a 0% APR offer may allow you to avoid paying interest on the balance for 6 or 12 months. However, its crucial you pay the card off before the promotional period ends. To avoid accumulating debt, make sure all payments fit within your overall budget and you have a set timeline for repayment.

9. Reuse Last Year’s Decorations

New can be exciting, but when it comes to last year’s Christmas decorations, you can reuse them! Christmas decorations can be expensive, and many of the latest trends are minor changes from the items you have in storage. Save money this year and deck the halls in last year’s ornaments and décor.

10. Open a Holiday Savings Account

Some banks and credit unions offer special, low-fee savings accounts for year-round savers to set aside holiday money, known as Holiday Savings Accounts. Some accounts come with benefits, such as automatic savings deposits and the option to receive the disbursement by a direct deposit or check on a certain day close to the holiday season for as little as $1 to open. There are many benefits to opening a holiday savings account, these include:

• Build your holiday savings account throughout the year
• Monitor your progress with online and mobile banking
• You get a deposit in mid-October to get an early start to your holiday shopping
• Earn interest on your holiday savings

It’s never to early to start saving for next year’s holiday season. Open a Holiday Savings account today!