I have a love/anxiety driven relationship with the holidays. Obviously I’m not a Scrooge and love the season, but the truth is that this sh*t is expensive and by the end of it, I feel like I’m hemorrhaging money. Maybe you can relate?
The past few years, Eddie and I wanted to stop the holiday gift bleeding to make sure we are shopping smarter and doing a few things to prep to save a little extra cash, so the holidays didn’t have to feel like we were going to financially burst!
Here are 3 money-saving hacks to make sure you are not busting your budget during the holidays:
Sell your uglies aka purge like now.
You may remember me talking about how I sold $20k of unused stuff around my house in the past year- don’t know what I’m referencing? Read it here. Anyways, long story short you need to selling things like right now. Be efficient and block out 1-2 hours of posting on multiple sites at the same time! We just purged a ton of things to give away and posted any items with even a little value that have been going unused. It all has sold in 2 weeks. I don’t know how else to say this, but people want your ugly sh*t. We used Poshmark, Tradesy, Letgo + Facebook Marketplace. Just do it.
Use those points to flip into cards.
Do you save up points on your card? Flip your credit card points into free money by turning them into gift cards {i.e. Amazon, Target, Nordstrom} and using them on loved ones. You won’t believe how far those points go when you convert them and we’ve gone many years where almost our whole list was paid for by our credit card points.
Secret Santa + Amazon Wish Lists
If you have even semi-large families, you will immediately benefit from this. The truth is as we get older, we need less, but what we want is v v v specific, so why make people guess? We have family Secret Santa where one person picks and shares who has who and a budget limit is put in place. Kids are not part of this by the way! Then by a specific date, each of us is expected to add things to our list and circulate it among the family, so the guessing if they will like the item is obsolete, but it’s also way more personal than getting random gift cards for everyone. Don’t know how to create your list? Read about it here.
So that’s it! We try our best to stay within our means and not go crazy and it works. What are your money hacks during the holidays? Tell me down below:
Till next time,
P
xo