How to Budget for Christmas 2007

Okay, so the holiday season's over and we're in that brief respite period after the Christmas gifts are open and before the credit card bills hit the mailbox. If you're like me, peace-on-earth-goodwill-toward-men thoughts will be the furthest thing from your mind around mid-January or so when Visa, MasterCard and American Express all belly up to the bar for their turn to make mincemeat out of your finances. I spent many years with a post-Christmas credit card hangover that lasted deep into the following year as a made my minimum monthly payments well into autumn. Here are some tips I've come up with which helped me fund a big chunk of our 2006 Christmas expenditures. With a little advance planning now (late December or early January is NOT too early to plan for next year), you can take a chunk out of your next Christmas' spending too. These tips may not be worth the bother for some of you already rolling in dough but as a former single mom I can tell you that some of these meant I could give my daughter a Christmas somewhat resembling that of her better-off pals. It's not a big thing but then again, if you're a struggling parent, you know just how a big thing it really is:

• Do you have a credit card which offers cash back dividends on everyday purchases? If so, USE it. If not, get one and USE it. Cash-back credit cards usually offer a percentage of your purchases back for everyday items such as grocery store purchases, gasoline purchases and dining out. Instead of automatically whipping out your debit card or checkbook, charge these purchases and immediately go home and pay the equal amount to your credit card company. You won't accrue interest and you'll get cash back for your purchases. I sat on a Citibank Platinum Select card which I'd had for years because I didn't bother to learn about the cash dividends when my card got upgraded. Last year the light bulb came on over my head and I began to use the card for my everyday stuff and immediately pay for my purchases online. By October or so I had "taken" Citibank for nearly the full amount of cash back I was entitled to (in the case of my card, $300 per calendar year) which I received as a check in the mail. That's nearly $300 in cold hard cash which I put aside for Christmas. In the case of Citibank, it allows you to cash out each time your cash-back balance is $50 or greater, up to their maximum. Many cards also offer a percentage of cash back for non-everyday purchases (i.e. online purchases).

Along this same line, pay attention to those annoying little inserts you get along with your credit card statement. For a few months, Citibank offered a higher percentage of cash back for restaurant dining but in order to get the higher percentage you had to acknowledge that you wanted it. If I hadn't paid attention to my annoying little insert I wouldn't have received the higher percentage.

• There are some websites out there which will pay you in 'points' to read their emails. These points are accumulated and can be redeemed for gift cards. I know, I know. It sounds stupid and time-consuming and sometimes when I would open email after email I would think the same thing. Until I was able to redeem my points and get maybe a $10 or even $25 gift card (or more) around Christmas time.

One of the best ones, in my opinion, is My Points (http://www.mypoints.com). Sign up is free and the first step is filling out some questionnaires on your interests and habits. Note that My Points sends you emails to open for points based upon the interests you indicate; therefore, if you want to rack up the most points by receiving the most emails, you should indicate as many interests and hobbies as apply to you. Once you start receiving My Points emails you open them, scroll down to the red button which will read either "Show Me More" or "Get Points," and click on it. It opens another window which you can either read and visit or close out as soon as it loads. Either way, you get credit for 5 points. Now the redemption level may seem high (i.e., a $5 gift card may run you 850 points; a $25 gift card can run you 3,500 points), but the points really do rack up fast. I receive around 20-25 emails a week on average.

I am recommending My Points in particular because I've been with them for about four years now. I was exceedingly skeptical at first, even when my first gift card arrived. But they're not fly-by-night, all my gift cards arrived quickly and fully activated and I am thrilled with the program. By the way, My Points doesn't offer gift cards to obscure little places no one would visit in the first place; among the stores you may choose gift cards from are Barnes & Noble, Bath & Body Works, Circuit City, The Gap, JC Penney, Kohl's, Macy's, Old Navy, Overstock and many, many more.

And speaking of shopping: If you make a lot of online purchases, My Points can total up even faster. Once you're a member, if you first log onto your my Points account and use their links to get to your stores (stores such as Abebooks, The Apple Store, Barnes & Noble, Best Buy, Overstock, etc.), you get additional points for your shopping. What if you used your cash-back credit card to pay for the purchases? Cash back AND additional points toward a gift card? It's almost like double-dipping!

• Another helpful website: http://www.netwinner.com. Net Winner is a simple little game in which you spin a roulette style wheel for points. Once you accumulate 25,000 points, it can be redeemed for a $25 gift card. I joined up in October and am working on my fourth gift card. Of course there are irritating websites you need to visit on occasion (nothing is free, after all) but it's only a mild irritant. Since spinning a cyberwheel is not the least bit challenging, this site can get very tedious, very fast. But it doesn't hurt to have it going on in a separate window while you're online, spinning the thing every couple of minutes or so. If you don't pay it too much attention the points can accumulate slowly but steadily and you'll have more gift cards under your belt. I figure that with a fair amount of diligence, a member should be able to get three or four gift cards a year. That's $75 or so more toward Christmas.

One quick note about these websites: Are they using cookies to track you? Probably so. Easy fix: Go to the command line at the top of your browser's window. Click on "Tools" - then on "Internet Options." There's both a "Delete Cookies" command as well as a "Delete Files" command which will eliminate the cookies as well as clear your cache of temporary internet files. It's no big deal.

• Do you roll up and save your coins? If not, how come? My new husband sort of laughed at me when I began rolling up the spare change when we first moved in together. Later in the year, when I toted over $80 in coins to the bank and turned it into folding money for the Christmas fund, it wasn't so funny. That's getting into the realm of "real money," as hubby would say. Did I feel a little funny walking into the bank with all those coins? Yeah, but only 'cause I loaded them up into a canvas tote and I had a definite lurch to one side while I waited in line. But what the hell? I can't afford to disregard $80 just laying around the house, can you?

• Do you recycle for money? I do. Where I live aluminum cans are recyclable for cash. Granted, it's not a whole lot of cash but we have room in the garage for many bags of rinsed out, crushed aluminum cans. I won't make many trips to the recyclers but I will a few times a year if necessary. That's money in my Christmas fund versus money in the trash can or dumpster. Hey, I come from a working class family and to my way of thinking, willfully disregarding a source of easy income, however small, is a crime.

• Do you like to read and get rid of many books throughout the year? Do you know someone else who likes to haunt used book stores? I do and here's one way I gave my mom a neat little Christmas present when I literally had nothing to give. I cleaned out my book collection (older as well as newer paperbacks and some hard backs I'd been toting around for years) and took them to a used bookstore we both like. The owner there turned my old books into store credit which I asked him immediately to turn into a gift certificate which I then gave to my mom as part of her Christmas. My apartment was cleaner (books can make any area awfully cluttered, awfully fast), my mom was thrilled (she got to purchase new clutter for her place) and I got to give her something tailored to her taste and it didn't cost the dime I didn't have in the first place.

• This last one sounds obvious and silly but it's important. PLAN AHEAD A LITTLE. My husband spent all year putting together a really special gift for his mother. Technically, it could've been ready to ship by mid-November. But lack of planning meant that we spent $18 to FedEx something which could've gone for about $8 or so, Parcel Post, had the planning been better.

There's many other tricks, including using cents-off coupons and putting the cents saved away for Christmas (sort of falls in line with the rolled coins suggestion, doesn't it?), taking advantage of post-Christmas sales to cut down on wrap and ribbon expense, and the like and I'm sure there's some really obvious suggestions that I haven't thought about. Frankly, I don't do the coupons 'cause I'm fundamentally a lazy person and as you may have noticed, the suggestions I've listed are relative painless, free and easy to incorporate into your everyday, post-Christmas life. I hope these are helpful to someone, and if you have a great suggestion I'd personally love to hear it because just living can be expensive and stressful enough; I'd love to see our holiday seasons be neither of these two things.