Everyone starts stressing out about Christmas shopping as Thanksgiving approaches, especially when everyone is on a tighter budget this holiday season. Here is one way to bring down the cost of your holiday gift giving.
An easy tip, if you don’t mind braving bargain hunting crowds, is to save your holiday shopping for those friends and family members you will be seeing after the holidays until after Christmas Day. You can often find great bargains as stores are trying to clear out of all kinds of gift baskets, gift sets and any kind of gift that is with holiday packaging. So this means that gorgeous gift set you were eying up before Christmas could be as much as 75% or 80% off when you purchase it after Christmas.
So next time you look at your Christmas shopping list, see who you could purchase gifts for after the Christmas season instead of before. You can translate this into either saving more money, or being able to get more bang for the same amount of money you had budget for those people.
Want to take advantage of the after Christmas sales even more? Suggest to some family members or friends that it might be better to do gift exchanging after Christmas… you don’t have to come out and tell them that it is because you want to be able to get their gifts on sale. Instead, just say the time is so busy right before Christmas that it makes more sense to exchange them afterwards when things aren’t so busy… and if you have kids, you can suggest that you should do it so they have something to look forward in the post-Christmas time period.
I did this last year and saved money, since we weren’t travelling to see my family until New Year’s Eve. I got my mom one of those huge fancy Body Shop gift baskets for 80% off or something crazy like that. I think it was cranberry scent so definitely holiday, but she loves fruity stuff and was ecstatic.