According to a 2011 Business Insider report, Americans spent around $708 on Christmas gifts.Log In I am sure the dollar amount is higher, two-years later. If you are like me, you don't want to spend this much money. How do you save money on this holiday? My biggest money-saving tip is to patronize discount stores for stocking stuffers. Set a price of $5 or under for each item. A friend of mine saves money by shopping the day after Christmas.
I usually set an amount that I want to spend on each person on my list. This helps me narrow down the possibilities and avoid those "spur-of-the-moment" choices! Our family has really cut down on gifting, and usually just buy one item for those in our extended family (except Grandma, we all buy for her!). We also make a lot of homemade gifts. I have found that people would rather have a lot of "little" things that they can use every day, instead of one big gift. We also have started doing our Christmas dinner like a potluck, where everyone brings something. This keeps the whole burden from falling on one or two people.
My best tip is to start early and do your research especially in terms of annual trends because this is how you really get to find the feel of where to go at certain times to get the best deals and take advantage of the biggest promos. For example, the choice of buying at a physical store or online is always a difficult question but if you look at the annual trends of how much discount you are able to get with either, as well as factoring in the types of items you are able to get with either method en you should be more able to decide on where you can get the best products at the lowest prices.
The best tip that I could give is to ship early, and by early I mean REALLY REALLY early, like a year before. I have found that a lot of the Christmas stuff that you might need to buy is usually on sale big time right after Christmas, and so if you can go the days afterwards and just think ahead a little bit, you can end up saving a ton of money. Just make sure that you have the space to store everything.
