Powercat Financial is having our annual “Thrifty Gifting” event coming up on November 8th, from 4:30pm to 5:30pm in the Union room 227. During this event you will learn how to manage and save money during the holiday season. There will also be free food, fun games and lots of cool prizes!
In 2021 the average US individual budgeted around $1,000 on holiday gifts. With inflation at a record high this number is likely to increase for 2022. For most college students that can be the majority of their paycheck or savings, which in return could make the holiday season a lot more stressful than it needs to be. If you are looking to enjoy the holidays stress free, it is important to create a spending plan specifically for the holiday season. Whether you’re struggling with overspending during the holidays or are just simply looking for better ways to budget around the holidays, here are a few tips and tricks that I have found.
- Set a Maximum Spending Limit
The first step and arguably the most important step in the holiday budgeting process is to figure out how much you can spend. Now this is different on a person to person basis and can be tough to figure out for yourself, but it is important to establish a hard limit to ensure that you stay on budget. A good way to do this is to think of how many gifts you are going to be buying and find a reasonable gift price average. For example, if you are buying gifts for 8 different people and you want to spend $50/person than your overall holiday budget would be $400. Now if you project that you are going to have other holiday expenses such as travel, food or decorations it is important to estimate and add those on to your overall budget as well.
- Finding the Best Deals
One of the most crucial parts of the holiday budgeting process is finding the right gifts and also finding them at a decent price. There are plenty of stores that have early Black Friday deals. Places such as Apple, Amazon and Garmin currently have deals on a lot of their everyday items preparing for the rush of holiday shoppers. Attached is a blog post that has a lot of great early black Friday deals that are currently going on https://www.tomsguide.com/deals/best-black-friday-deals.
- Saving Up Year-Round
Holiday budgeting doesn’t just start a couple months or week before the season. It is very important to be thinking ahead throughout the whole year. The cost of holiday budgeting can often be overwhelming and un-doable for a one-two month budget. Save yourself some stress and financial burden by slowly saving up cash throughout the year for these special expenses.
- Find Other Work
If you are struggling to find room in your budget for these holiday expenses, you might need to find some seasonal/part-time jobs to help get you through these expenses. This new source of income can be used to cover most if not all of your holiday expenses.
Holiday budgeting can be stressful and can easily get out of control if you don’t closely pay attention to what you are spending your money on. That is why it is important to follow these steps to help lower your financial stress around the holiday seasons!
Feel free to stop by Powercat Financial and we can assist you in creating your holiday budget! We are located on the 3rd floor of the Union in room 302.
Kolby Stein
Peer Counselor II
Powercat Financial
www.k-state.edu/powercatfinancial
