TV news segment featuring financial expert Louis Barajas offering practical advice to save money during holiday shopping. Key recommendations include making a gift list with per-person budgets, totaling and adjusting to stay within an overall spending limit, avoiding store credit cards, comparison-shopping online (including apps), limiting spending on decorations and travel, and using Secret Santa to reduce gift count. The piece emphasizes planning early to avoid last-minute overspending.
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Well, walk into any major department store and you'll see the holiday decorations going up. Our financial expert Luis Barajas is the author of My Street Money. And this morning he's here with some important tips to help you save money while doing your holiday shopping. We want to welcome you back and we want to start out with your first tip. You say Santa makes a list of who's nutty or nice. And you say all of us should make a list.
That's right. What happens is that we have unconscious spending habits. And what happens, most people procrastinate and wait till the very last day to shop. Right. And so what's happening this year is we don't have that Black Friday anymore. People are going to start shopping early. So what I'm telling people is get prepared. You need to start writing down first a list of all the people that you want to give presents to next. The thing is, you want to add a budget to that list that you're going to give. But then what you want to do is you want to adjust. You want to add it all up and say, am I going to spend that much money? What is my total amount that I really have to spend? And you need to keep adjusting and make sure that you stay within your budget.
Okay, that's good advice and what you say to keep within your budget, but how do you budget for all of those gifts?
Well, again, what you have to do is take a look at your average budget. Say, how much money will I be able to afford and pay off my credit card bills within the next month or two. If it's going to go beyond that, you're going to spend way too much money. But here's the other thing you have to be careful about during the holiday shopping, right? You're going up there, you're going to be spending, let's say 3, $400. And what do they tell you? Would you like to get a credit card from this department store so you can save 10%? We'll also give you points, extra points. And you're so enticed by that. But I'm telling. That sounds good. Yeah, it sounds great. Now, for the short term, when I tell people, look, you know, just avoid that, say no, say thank you, but I'm not really interested. I know you're going to save 30 bucks or 40 bucks, but it's going to get you in trouble down the.
Long term because you have to be so regimented on getting it paid off.
Absolutely. A couple more things you just want to worry about, and that is people spend a lot of money right now. I've been going, like to Costco's and other stores and all the decorating stuff out there. Right. The big Christmas Santa's on and all the other holiday stuff. Be very careful about what you're spending on decorations and also what you also want to do. Right now. People travel a lot during the holiday season. So again, start looking out on the Internet if you're going to be traveling early so you can find cheap flight reservations, hotels, whatever you're going to do. Put it all in perspective. It's really all about creating more memories. Right. Not creating more credit, more debt. That's what we want.
Things are so expensive now. It's hard to find a good, cheap gift.
Well, it is and it is. And again, one of the best things that people can do is go online and take a look at what you can find and comparison shop. That's one of the best things you can do. Also, did you know that there are a lot of apps out there right now for holiday shoppers? You can actually put the name of the person, the gift, and if you put the actual gift on there, it actually starts looking for where you can find the cheapest place. So go on your itunes store and look for different kind of apps that help you shop and save money during the holidays.
And you know what my family does on Thanksgiving after dinner, we put all of our names in a hat and we draw a name, and you only buy one gift for the family.
That's another wonderful. The Secret Santa. Right. We do that for our family as well. We have such a big family that if we were to buy presents for everybody, you'd go broke. So you couldn't do that. So you do this secret sand. And we're always, always hoping that, you know, the rich uncle or the rich person pulls our name out of the hat. But, yeah, that's one of the best ideas you can absolutely do.
All right, well, thank you so much, Lewis, for honor joining us and giving us those tips. We certainly need them. Christmas just around the corner, I believe, but it is starting to feel a little cooler out there. So it kind of gets us in the spirit. Right, Bridgefield.
