Regrets, I have a few – mostly related to my holiday spending

Do you find yourself wallowing in post-holiday financial regret each January? Wonder how you managed to spend so much money yet have so little to show for it? Maybe you’ve gone so far as to regret buying gifts for family members you don’t even like. Excellent! Me too. Let’s fix it.

Fear not, I’m not going to tell you to just set a budget in 11 months and stick to it. I know that’s not how the festive season works. It’s a booby-trapped minefield of hidden costs and expectations wrapped up as the gift that keeps on taking in the form of depleted savings, credit card interest and self-loathing.

The pre-Christmas build-up

The lead-up to Christmas involves numerous social events that can leave your wallet emptier than bottle of gin in a retirement home. The warmer weather often leads to drinks after work in garden bars – inevitably not a cheap night out, particularly if you overindulge and decide takeaways and a taxi are required.

How not to repeat this mistake:

1. Drive so you can’t join in the shouting of rounds.
2. Take cash, and once it runs out then don’t spend any more so you can explore ‘moderation’ with both your alcohol consumption and your spending. Has bonus option of smugness about how your wallet and head feel the next day.
3. If you opt for the more is more approach, then don’t buy pricey booze when you know quite well that after the first few glasses you’re not so much appreciating the subtle flavours as you are the alcohol content. 
4. Eat first so you don’t wind up scoffing kebabs at 11pm, spilling sauce on yourself incurring a drycleaning bill on top of the hangover.

You should also note that most of the above advice also applies to Saturday night all year round.

Christmas

Personally, I feel Christmas is less about season’s greetings and more about season’s eatings. However, it’s a rare family that doesn’t have some sort of gift-giving system in place and if, like me you are a panicked, last-minute shopper who thinks that more money spent on presents equals more love and affection, then you too need to rethink your approach to this custom.

Deciding how much to spend on various family members is a delicate dance that often backfires spectacularly if you do skimp on some family members, who will look at your gifts and then at theirs and mentally calculate the difference between what they spent on you versus what you spent on them and adjust their love accordingly. But there are ways to rein in the madness, my friends.

Top tips:

1. Passive aggression. Instead of agreeing on a budget with your family, just announce that you’re only buying for the children because only they really appreciate Christmas. Alternatively, tell your family that you’ve organised a system for everyone where you buy for just one person – and you’ve already bought your gift. Such tactics mean naysayers look greedy and petulant, and that’s not in the Christmas spirit at all, now is it?
2. Buy gifts early, potentially saving money into the bargain, and then gloat about it.
3. Plonk all your purchases on credit card to get the airpoints, so you can escape somewhere far better next month.
4. Pay that credit card off within a month so as not to incur dastardly interest.

This last point is also why it is crucially important your spend post-Christmas isn’t astronomical. Which leads us to Boxing Day.

Boxing Day

Obviously there are several things you can do on Boxing Day, such as practise your ‘sloth eating a ham sandwich impression’, but today we’ll look at the two that are notoriously hard on the pockets.

1. The races. This involves wearing overpriced clothes the day after you have eaten your own body weight in baked meats and pav while gambling on equine hoofery. Try winning by not leaving the house – shout at the races on the telly and place 10 cent bets with those relatives still talking to you, while having easy access to clean toilets and a beer fridge.
2. The Boxing Day sales. My personal Waterloo. I was at Harvey Norman at 8am on Boxing Day to get a breadmaker. And some new parts for my electric toothbrush. And a milk frother. Because I need all these things.

Smart people know they do not need these things.

To sum up

The holiday period is all about the agony and the ecstasy – the agony of not spending what you think you should spend, and the ecstasy of a healthy bank account in January. If you can successfully negotiate this, then all you have to do is avoid falling into the bottomless pit of debt that is a New Year’s Eve event and you’ve smashed through what is traditionally a very expensive time of year. Well done, you. And if you fail, well, there’s always next Christmas. And the one after that…