Making the Holidays special—without blowing your budget
Monday, November 3rd, 2008
I’ll admit it. I’m a holiday junkie. The lights, the presents, the veritable cornucopia of feel-good glitter everywhere, stirs in me a powerful need to buy stuff. Couple that with a desire to ensure that my wife and my son have a magical Holiday season and you have a recipe for financial disaster. In fact, the only variable isn’t when the disaster will occur, but how much damage will be done.
You’d think, being a marketer, I’d be hip to all the tips and tricks of the trade, but the truth is, I get suckered into the advertisements and deals that inevitably spring forth this time of year like weeds in my backyard. I’m not prepared for the onslaught, and so I get suckered in, drifting from purchase to purchase in a vain attempt to make this Holiday season better than the last.
The truth is that filling the Holidays with gifts isn’t my problem—it’s the way I approach buying gifts that leads to my inevitable New Year’s budgetary heartburn. See, I’m like most people, I wait until a few weeks before the Holidays, buy what I can in cash and then put the rest on the credit card and say to myself, “well, I’ll just have to cut back the first two months of the year.” The plan never works and I end up stuck with credit card debt I didn’t really need.
My mother, herself a self-proclaimed holiday junkie, has a system for holiday shopping. She takes a certain amount out of each of her paychecks during the year, usually about $50, and then sticks it in her purse and doesn’t touch it for the entire year. While I don’t advocate growing your holiday shopping budget in something as insecure as a purse, Finicity Money Manager works along the same principle. Essentially, if you plan how to use your money BEFORE you spend it, when it comes time to shop, you aren’t filled with buyer’s remorse. Instead you can bask in the feel-good glitter of multiple holiday gifts without the worry of incurring more debt.
While it’s too late for me this year, next year promises to be better. After all, since I’m new to Finicity, I can now take advantage of Money Manager which means more planning and less stress. And, as we all know, that’s a good thing.
Happy Holidays!
Andrew Parker, Marketing
