Now that the dust is settling after the mayhem of shopping, work parties and general craziness of buying for family, relations and friends over the Christmas, have you managed to figure out yet if you lived within your means - or did you ‘bust the budget’ again this year?
If you have dipped a little deeper into the cash reserves than you’d intended – well, fear not dear friends, for you are not alone.
Here’s some news that will come as no surprise: overspending at Christmas time is something of a national sport around here.
As with so many things in our finances, it has a lot to do with not planning ahead. Remember the old proverb ‘failing to plan is planning to fail’? Well, it’s never more true than with our money management at Christmas.
The fact is, almost three-fifths of us fail to plan ahead by saving for Christmas, and over half of us don’t plan out how much we can afford to spend over both Christmas and the New Year.
Of those who do plan, the average budget we set ourselves is £384 for the festive season, which is to cover both presents and our ‘nights out’ or entertainment.
When you think about it, putting away £1 a day would nearly cover this basic budget – but having the self-discipline not to ‘dip in’ during the year would be another matter entirely!
Not all of us stick to our budget, though; a quarter of us either overspend or go into debt, and women are more likely to overspend than men.
The ‘overspenders’ rack up an average debt of £414 over the Christmas, but people in the 45-54 age group overspend by much more - typically £519, providing something of an additional headache as we move into the New Year.
On the positive side, even those of us who do overspend have developed plenty of tricks to save a few pounds here and there, as well.
Here are a few quirky facts about the short cuts and downright oddball things we do, to save a little money over the Christmas period.
A quarter of us buy gifts with no clear idea who we’re giving them to, last-minute back-ups that pull us out of a hole when that unexpected relative appears, or a package comes our way from the friend we didn’t expect to buy for us this year.
When we are on the receiving end of an expected or unexpected gift, we shouldn’t expect that the gifts we’ve been given are even new!
Did you know that many of the cards, paper or gifts we’ve been given this year were bought during last year’s New Year sales?
The fact is that a third of us do that each year, and then store them away in a safe place for the 11 months, until it’s time to dig them out, dust them down and put them to good use. It’s a practice that’s much more common among women (43 per cent) than among men (23 per cent).
We’re also very inclined to recycle the paper, tags and bags we’ve received with our own gifts this year, to parcel up the ones we’re giving out – and sometimes even the gifts as well.
In fact nearly a third of us pass on presents we’ve received to someone else as their Christmas gift. Again, a much more common practice among women (43 per cent) than men (18 per cent).
Oh and by the way, if any of this year’s packaging is still lying about over there in the tree corner, you might want to take a real close look at the straight edges on those gift tags. It appears that one in five of us are in the habit of cutting up last year’s Christmas cards to use as this year’s gift tags - again with women (27 per cent) admitting they are much more likely culprits than men (14 per cent).
Hopefully some of these little quirks may have brought a smile - if you recognised yourself in these lines, well, the similarity was neither wilful nor intentional, but merely … unavoidable!
:: Michael Kennedy is an independent financial adviser and pensions specialist, and can be contacted on 028 71886005
