Finance Roll

A wise man once said that it is never too early to start thinking about making a budget for your Christmas shopping. As much as it would be fun to purchase any gift that we like for our friends and relations during our Christmas shop, the reality is that most of us have limited fund and must budget carefully. Here are a few tips on how to set a budget and stick to it this Christmas season.

Most people, it can be said, take a most unusual approach to their Christmas budgets. They wait until the last-minute and buy as many top Christmas toys 2010 is promoting this year, which usually leads to frustration as most of the toys have already been sold out by this time. There are better ways, as we shall see. A better way of setting a budget for Christmas is to allocate small sums of money to a separate Christmas account during the year. By the time Christmas arrives, people who save up this way will have allocated enough money to happily start their shopping. If not opening a bank account, you might put a certain amount of money into an envelope each pay-day during the year.

Many other people take a different approach to budgeting for Christmas, they shop throughout the year and accumulate gifts rather than money. Of the two ways we have seen so far, this is smarter because it not only makes budgeting less stressful, but saves you time in the process. If you do this diligently enough, by the time Christmas rolls around, you will most likely have only a small amount of shopping to do, which will be a simple and cheap task to accomplish. Another advantage of shopping this way is that can take your pick of the top Christmas toys, well in advance of everyone else. You also have the advantage of waiting until there is a sale can save you quite a lot of money if you are savvy throughout the year.

It is usually better to pay cash to purchase toys, rather than credit, as credit needs to be paid back with a large amount of interest. If you use either of the strategies mentioned, you can reduce your reliance on credit considerably, as you are setting aside surplus cash every pay. If you do need to shop with credit, then the advantage of buying toys over the entire year allows you to manage your credit repayments much more efficiently reducing the burden and reducing the stress.