Christmas may be the time of joy, but January can be grim if you overspend.
The temptations are vast: from pre-Christmas party wear to Black Friday ‘sales’, presents to food and wine and the Boxing Day sales.
Here’s how to make sure you don’t have a festive hangover in the New Year.
Create a budget and stick to it
Over the course of the Christmas season every retailer is going to be looking for cunning ways to tempt you to buy.
You need firm discipline and an iron will. Set a budget for presents for each person, for Christmas dinner, for sale shopping and anything else that might arise. You’ll probably break it, but at least you’ve set yourself some limits.
It can also help to set parameters around gift giving. If you find that your circle of recipients gets bigger every year, try to manage it down, or agree to give small, token gifts with a specific limit.
You don’t want Secret Santa to become Secret Grinch, but it is worth limiting how many groups you’re in.
Beware the lure of credit
There’s no point in hunting around for the best bargains, only to put it all on a credit card, not pay it off on time and end up paying 20-25% interest.
Credit cards are useful for deferring payment, but you need a clear plan for when it falls due and how you’ll pay it off.
Project ahead to how you might be feeling on ‘Blue Monday’, the third Monday in January – and supposedly the most depressing day on the year – when you have no money, you’ve just broken your New Year’s resolutions and the credit card bill has landed.
Right-size your Christmas dinner
The Waste and Resources Action Programme found that the average person in the UK wastes around 95kgs of food every year, or 341kgs for a family of four[1].
Christmas is a major pinch point. Almost everyone over-orders and the food either goes to waste, or families spend weeks chowing down old bits of turkey, or worse, left-over sprouts.
Shopping online can instil some discipline, with fewer temptations and impulse spending.
Making the most of others’ unwanted gifts
The post-Christmas period can be a great time to bag bargains on recycling sites such as Vinted, or Vestiaire Collective as people offload unwanted gifts.
This may prove even more fruitful than the Boxing Day sales.
Savvy shopping
With Black Friday behind us, it’s easy to think there won’t be any more discounting before 25 December. But Boxing Day sales often start before Christmas.
If you know what you want to buy, you can watch out for the best prices and snap up bargains as they arise. This can also help prevent impulsive spending, the enemy of Christmas spending discipline.
Websites such as Camelcamelcamel are primarily aimed at checking prices on Amazon but provide a really good reference point on historical prices to ensure the ‘deal’ you find really is a bargain.
Alternatives which look at a wide array of online shops include PriceSpy and PriceRunner.
Remember when all is said and done, the most important rules for spending are Do you need it? and Can you afford it?
Without being too much of a Grinch, often the best way to save money is by not spending at all!
[1] https://www.wrap.ngo/resources/report/household-food-and-drink-waste-united-kingdom-2021-22