It may be too late to save for the festive season, but it is still possible to ignore the marketing hype and reduce spending, which will be better for the planet and your pocket. Frugal experts share their advice on how to save money this Christmas.
Limit your exposure to unreal expectations of Christmas
“There are ways that you can embrace all of the joy, warmth and connection of Christmas without creating a really difficult financial situation for yourself,” says Clare Seal, the author of Five Steps to Financial Wellbeing and creator of the Instagram account @myfrugalyear, who lives in Bath. One way that Seal does this is by avoiding social media accounts that offer too much temptation. “Christmas used to be about which family had the best lights on their house,” she says. “But now we can see inside people’s homes on social media and we have got a really distorted perception of how much stuff people are buying because influencers are quite often gifted lots of stuff.” The solution? “If you have a problem with spending when you are exposed to these things, the best thing that you can do is to remove all of that noise. Mute or unfollow accounts that trigger envy or comparison. Unsubscribe from marketing emails. The carrot for signing up is that you get a discount: create a separate email account that you only look at when you specifically decide that you want to.”
Don’t throw money at the problem
“Sometimes I buy things just so I can close the tab on my phone,” admits Seal. The increased mental load in December means “there are so many decisions to be made, so much Christmas admin to do” and it can be easy to throw money at the problem so that it is one less thing to worry about. “Quite often, I think we spend money so that we can file things under done,” she says.
Consider group presents
This is ingenious. “For each household,” says Seal, “we will put together a little box of gifts. For my husband’s father and stepmother, we have included our kids’ school photos, a Percy Pig decoration and a bottle of mead, so everyone individually has been thought of, but it is a lot more cost effective and less time consuming.”
Try a Secret Santa
Seal is a fan of doing Secret Santa for family members so you just buy and receive “one great present, rather than lots of token gifts”. Ken and Mary Okoroafor of financial blog The Humble Penny and authors of Financial Joy: Banish Debt, Grow Your Money and Unlock Financial Freedom in 10 Weeks are also on board with this: “It is helpful for making sure everybody gets something that was thought about intentionally,” says Ken.
Reject the notion that ‘it isn’t Christmas without …’
“We have an internal checklist of things that we think we have to do for it to be festive,” says Seal. “Go to a Christmas market or have a turkey – they are quite false or manufactured things. You don’t have to do all of those things for it to be a lovely Christmas.” Seal’s family will be having chicken this year “because it was a fraction of the price of a turkey of the same weight and no one will complain – our children probably like that better,” she says.
Budget for festive spending throughout the year
This is something Seal tries to do, where possible, “starting in February, because January is always tricky, and ending in November. Then the money is there to be spent.” If you haven’t saved this year, start asap in 2024. “Hold on to this feeling of discomfort that you have with the cost of Christmas and get it set up for next year,” she says. “If you don’t want to spend much at Christmas, you might get compared to Scrooge or the Grinch.” There is the perception that “Christmas should be when everything goes out of the window, but obviously you have to recover from that afterwards.”
Choose useful gifts
The Okoroafors live in Dartford, Kent and have two boys who are eight and nine. “We ensure that their gifts have plenty of variety,” says Mary. “We give them something to wear, something to read and something to play or create with.” They have not done stockings – as stocking fillers quickly add up – but might introduce them this year with items like deodorant, a toothbrush and skincare products. The adult Okoroafors tend not to buy gifts for each other, saving that for birthdays.
Have a potluck Christmas dinner
Ken and Mary are hosting this year and will have 25 guests. Instead of paying for the whole meal themselves, everyone will bring a dish, from turkey to jollof rice, sharing the workload and the cost. They suggest making a list and sticking to it when food shopping to avoid festive novelties that can slip into the trolley: “For people who get distracted by all the shiny items on the shelves we…
Read More: The experts: money gurus’ 20 failsafe, frugal tips to keep Christmas overspend