The seasonal shopping season is now upon us. Our family is in the process of exchanging names. In order to avoid overspending and to not stress the younger members of the family, we have a limit on our gift purchase price. My oldest brother tried to outlaw gift cards year before last-but we had a few gripes about that. Please see a prior post about gift cards.
How do you avoid overspending as a newly minted “Millionaire Nurse”. The secret here is not rocket science. It is planning and discipline.
Write your list of who you are buying for, and then a spending limit. Make sure you have a total maximum agreed upon by you and your partner ahead of time. Always plan a small additional amount of money to have on hand for the few folks you forget, or whose name you may draw at a work related event.
The experts are divided on what kind of shopping season this will be. Some think there is a large segment of consumers who have been hoarding cash, and will let go of some this year-kind of a consumer spending protest of all the economic uncertainty of the last couple of years.
Others fear the increased savings rate may be here to stay and retailers are in for a rough holiday season. If consumers do become less materialistic and make more donations, home-made presents, and gifts of time and love the rule this year-is that a bad thing?
I personally don’t thinks so. We live in a society that unfortunately has felt we were deprived if we don’t have a big, flat screen in every room of the house.
So get a few board games, a deck of cards, teach the kids to play canasta or bridge, or one of the money board games like Monopoly over the holidays. Save your pennies and spend time ringing the bell for the Salvation Army.
What are your family traditions surrounding gift giving and the holidays? What is your budget for holiday spending this year compared to last? Let me hear from you.
Tags: Holiday spending
Millionaire Nurse Blog
Great post — I think it’s really important to plan ahead of time how much you can spend on the holiday season. Starting back in the late summer, I made a list of all the people I’d actually give a gift to (luckily it’s just close family and friends), allotted how much I would spend on each, totaled it up, and pledged to save that amount by Black Friday.
That way, I don’t have to worry in the next few weeks about how I’m going to pay for all the Christmas gifts I just bought.
Thanks again for a great post,
Chris