With your Christmas preparations, starting soon is the key to saving money. If you leave your shopping to the last minute, not only do you have to face the 23rd December high street chaos, you’ll miss out on the excellent deals that many retailers offer early in the festive shopping season.
It’s incredibly easy to overspend at Christmas – doing your utmost to make savings where you can is the best way to avoid a festive hangover that lasts until that January paycheck finally arrives.
Here are our top four festive money saving tips:
Join a no-present pact
Do you ever find that your friends and relatives buy you Christmas gifts you don’t want? The sort that are used once on Christmas Day before being relegated to a dusty top shelf for a few years and then eventually given away to a charity shop?
We’re sure that most of us have been in this scenario at some point.
Joining a present pact is a great way of avoiding giving and receiving more than you need.
Not only will this save you money, it will also go a long way to reducing your environmental impact at a time where we buy and receive plenty that just ends up going to landfill. It can be a liberating revelation to admit to ourselves that others don’t really need ‘gimmicky’ Christmas gifts and neither do we.
Keep a Christmas present list
For people who don’t enter into your no-present pact, writing a list will give you a clear idea of what you need to buy. As well as avoiding traipsing through various shops by giving you a precise idea about exactly what you need, it means you won’t overspend by ‘panic-buying’ gifts at the last minute.
Brave Black Friday (and Cyber Monday)
Black Friday is a massive shopping event which this year falls on 23rd November. First implemented in the US, it became established in the UK in 2014. Despite its relatively recent history, you can find some truly incredible deals if you can brave the in-store queues and general bargain mania that this event famously provokes.
Cyber Monday follows on 26th November, when online retailers heavily discount their goods.
Some items sell out in seconds so it’s worth creating online accounts with your favourite shops in advance to save precious time.
Send your cards second class
Even small savings add up to make a difference. As the saying goes, ‘look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves’.
A standard first-class stamp now costs 67p, whereas a second class stamp costs 9p less at 58p. If you send 50 cards out at Christmas, this will add up to a £4.50 saving. This might not sound much, but trimming your Christmas spendings down in plenty of places will add up to a substantial amount.
Whatever you’re buying this Christmas, being thrifty never hurts. Thinking carefully about your choices and starting early are the easiest ways to make savings.