Planning ahead can take away stress
With Christmas just six weeks away, here are some tips to keeping financial stress away from the festive season.
If you’re one of the worriers, we’ve put together some tips to help you sleep at night.
Budget, budget, budget. You might be thinking: this is all very well but I just don’t have the money to stick in a savings account between now and Christmas.
That’s a very valid point. It’s not easy to find spare cash in the middle of an economic crisis. The best solution is to budget. Try and draw up a budget for the next six weeks and cut out any piece of non-essential spending.
If you do that, you may be able to find some spare cash for Christmas.
If you want to get the biggest possible bang from your Christmas savings buck, it makes sense to draw up a budget for Christmas too.
If you plan ahead and work out exactly what you need to buy, you’ll be less likely to waste money on stuff that you don’t actually need.
You can also cut your Christmas costs by shopping around online and see who is offering the best deal.
And if you’re shopping online, don’t forget to use cashback sites such as Quidco and Topcashback. If you’re lucky, you may be able to get as much as five per cent of your spending back on some purchases.
You could get some more money back if you use a cashback credit card for your spending.
If you took out the Capital One World MasterCard, you could get five per cent cashback on your spending for the first three months you had the card. However, as with a 0 per cent card, you can only get one of these if you have a strong credit rating.
No one has got a magic wand that suddenly makes it easy to cope financially at Christmas, but hopefully some of these tips will be useful all the same.