TRANSCRIPT:
What’s up Internet? My name is Ian Bloom. Welcome to Nerd Finance! I’m your resident financial life planner and huge nerd!
In today’s video we are going to be covering some money-saving tips during the holidays, because the holidays are just always expensive, frankly. Whether it’s a Christmas party you have to buy stuff for, just a get-together with your friends, or all of the gifts that you’re expected to shell out if you celebrate a gift-giving holiday this time of year – there’s a ton of stuff to do. So, I wanted to make sure to cover some tips for how you can save some money. Let’s get started!
My first of three tips for saving money during the holiday season begins with gift-giving. Gift-giving is usually something that is viewed as a huge chore – you have to go out and shop for everything and usually, the malls are very crowded. But, there are some very easy ways to reduce that. I would start out by making a list ahead of time of all the people that you know that you want to be shopping for. Start it during the month of November. Just keep a list of names jotted down. Wait for the big sales to come around, Black Friday is usually the big one, but there’s also some tradition called Cyber Monday which is really just Black Friday but the following Monday. Anyway, you can shop online for all of the gifts that you want for the most part. There aren’t a whole lot of artisan goods that you’ll be giving away this holiday season, because people generally want things that they’ve seen advertised. Finally, go ahead and purchase those items and have them shipped to your house in one big order. Then you’re done, all you need to do is wrap them if that’s what you want to do or throw them in gift bags. That makes gift-giving a whole lot easier and also a lot less expensive because you’re purchasing all these gifts ahead of time – you know what you’re spending and you’re doing it all during the sales, so win-win.
My second tip for saving money during the holiday season is frankly, just save money on sweets. You see, I like dessert as much as the next guy. I really enjoy sugary foods, but as it turns out my wife and I receive tons of cookies, candy canes, and other forms of candy and other sweets during the holiday season. So it almost feels like a waste to go out and buy some fresh cookies to make.
My last tip for saving money during the holidays…well, set up gift exchanges. Within our friend group, what we realized is that we’re all at different points in our career and have different amounts of money to spend, but we could all afford to spend $20 on one person within the friend group. So, we decided that we would just do a random gift exchange instead of everyone going out and buying individual presents for one another. I find that this makes it a lot more fun because nobody’s budget is stretched in order to provide the fun gifts to one another. But, it allows us to still get that good, intrinsic value of giving a gift and having it well received. So, I enjoy setting those up and I recommend that you guys do that too. It’s a good time.
Thanks so much for watching this video. I hope you enjoyed it, and if you did please make sure to like, comment, subscribe, and interact with the video in any way that you want. Then make sure to find your way over to our website at openworldfp.com there you can find the blog, which much like this YouTube channel features all the videos that I produce, but then it also has a transcript of all those videos if you’re just looking to find some key highlights. Thanks so much and have a wonderful day!
