The first new idea for controlling holiday spending is to enter an agreement with your spouse not to exchange presents but instead to spend a smaller amount of money doing something fun together. You’ll spend less and strengthen the marriage more by spending the time with each other rather than by shopping.
The second new idea for controlling holiday spending is to reserve the Saturday of the busiest party weekend for yourself or for your marriage. Let friends know early on that this will be a day of reflection when you will sit before a fire with a glass of wine in your hand and think about where you are going in your life (and talk over goals with your spouse, if you are married).
You still will end up attending plenty of parties, so there will still be a social component to your holidays. But this quiet and reflective time will add an important dimension to the holiday experience that otherwise would likely be missing from it. Reflecting on what you most want to do with your life is the best way to acquire the motivation needed to save.
The third new idea for controlling holiday spending is to identify a specific non-holiday purpose to which you would like to direct your money so that you will be better prepared to resist urges to spend.
Rather than saying “I can’t spend $20 more for the most beautiful tree (which makes you sound cheap),” say “I can’t buy that tree this year because I am trying to put together $1,000 to pay for a family reunion that my spouse and I will be attending out of town in about two months.”
The reason why it is hard to say “no” to urges to spend money is that the urges are specific while the alternative to spending is a general desire to save money. Specific claims always appear more pressing than general ones. This is why journalists often open newspaper or magazine articles with anecdotes illustrating the point made in the article. Specifics have an emotional pull that abstractions lack.
The fourth new idea for controlling holiday spending is to regularly review where you stand in regard to your holiday spending plan.
Don’t wait until you have bought all the gifts you intend to buy for the year before going through receipts and adding up how much you have spent. If you learn then that you have exceeded your holiday spending targets, it’s already too late to do anything about it.
The key to controlling holiday spending (and other types of spending too) is regularly reviewing where you stand. My wife and I used to take a two-hour walk each Saturday afternoon to talk over all sorts of things, including where we stood with our financial plan. That helped a lot.
The fifth new idea for controlling holiday spending (for the following year) is to make New Year’s Day a day to write a budget, or to revise the one you already have, rather than simply to make a resolution to try to get spending under control. Single-issue resolutions don’t stick because they are not integrated with your other life, work and money goals. A budget will stick if you think of it as a plan for achieving your most important life goals rather than as a way to reduce spending.
Make budget-writing a celebration of the positive changes that one brings to one’s life through effective saving. My wife and I rewrite our budget each New Year’s day. We go to a bed and breakfast, spend most of one day rewriting our budget and the Life Plan that it finances, and then have dinner together at a nice restaurant and talk over our new goals and the progress we made on bringing our goals from the previous New Year’s Day to realization over the course of the year now ended.