5 Tips For a Hassle-Free Christmas Shopping
posted on Nov 22, 2019 | 341 likes
Before you go your Christmas shopping, read this.
The Christmas holiday will soon be upon us. It usually starts with a lot of excitement and of course, the impulsive need to buy almost anything that would help reflect our excitement for the season.
While this is fine because it only happens once in a year, it is also very important to be deliberate about how we spend money and other resources during Christmas period.
While spending, remember that just after the Christmas and new year celebration, the children will have to return to school. If you have no children or you are single and working, you’ll have to wait for about 38 days (from Christmas) to get another pay cheque.
Now that’s a long time. If you mismanaged the holiday with sporadic spending, you could have a tough time in January.
We don’t want that to happen to you, but we want you to live happy this Christmas and shop confidently, so we have compiled these 5 tips to help you get a hang of shopping this season.
Let’s get to it.
1. Make a list.
The first step to failure when shopping on a budget is not making a shopping list, you know why? Because when you start shopping, everything simply looks ‘nice to have’, and before you know it, you are out of cash.
List the things you need to spend money on, for example; Christmas décor, Christmas dinners, Christmas party (if that’s your tradition), family and/or friends’ outings, Christmas gifts, the food among other things.
Look at the list items and arrange them in order of importance, be honest with yourself. You should consider the essentials first, then evaluate the fun items later. Inquire the price of the items so you can easily work on sorting later.
2. Have a budget
Now that you have a list, and the items have price tags, you should take a back seat, evaluate your income, analyze your present condition, project your January needs, then based on your income and savings, map out an amount that you can confortably spend this season.
With that amount in mind, revisit your list and do the math. If your projected spend is less than what you have on the list, it’s time to cut down on the unnecessary spend such as exorbitant spend on décor or other things that necessarily do not add to the Christmas experience. This way you would be able to spend more on the things that matter the most.
Remember to reserve some budget for miscellaneous items, this is Christmas and price of commodities can go high at any time.
3. Look for discount deals
Heard of Black Friday? This is the season for those special slash sales. In fact, this is probably the only time of the year where almost every store would have something off the usual price on gifts and other items that are not necessarily Christmas inclined.
A lot of businesses would compete to get you to buy or patronize their services at a lower rate. Therefore, there is no better time to look out for deals than Christmas.
While a lot of people might be focused on getting the Christmas inclined items, watch out for deals on the other things you would love to purchase before their prices go up in the New Year.
Getting appropriate deals could reduce your spending by as much as 50% giving you power to purchase more items on your list, or save.
4. Be strategic with shopping
There is usually a spike in the prices of items when Christmas is much closer. It’s not ideal to shop at this time. Also, weekends have proven to have higher traffic of customers than weekdays. If you can, avoid shopping on weekends too.
On the weekends, most malls, stores and open market places would be so packed that you would get discouraged before you even start your purchases.
If you can, try to go shopping at the beginning of the week. Monday and Tuesday are ideal to shop in relative peace. If this is not convenient for you because of work, you should go early in the day on the weekends, which should give you enough time to do your shopping before the stores become congested.
5. The Internet is your friend
Before the age of the internet and eCommerce, you would walk street by street, store by store and market by market – depending on what you are looking to buy.
That has changed, the internet has changed how we live and shop, it’s up to you to use it to make your life easy.
Instead of going on a long and exhausting tour of the stores, do some online window shopping first. Most of your favorite’s stores would probably have an ecommerce website or an active presence on various social media platforms.
Start by confirming the availability of the items you would like to buy and their price. This way you would save yourself some time and the stress of walking from store to store for a particular item.
In conclusion
The Holidays are here already, major stores have already started running black Friday deals, companies are prepping to close up for the year, those bonuses and 13th salary will roll in.
However, if you don’t plan, you could ruin everything with one wrong purchase, or purchase timing.
What if your favorite deal is on and your salary is taking long to come in? is there still hope of shopping? Of course, yes, that’s why our business exist.
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