8 Ways to Save Money This CHRISTMAS! 2023 Holiday Budget Hacks

With the holidays coming up, there tends to be a little bit of financial stress when it comes to this time of year. You want to spend money on the things that bring you joy or bring others joy, but you also want to stick to your financial goals. In this video, I'm going to be talking about some holiday budget hacks that you can start incorporating right now to keep things financially sensible and under control. Hey guys, it's Justine, your host of the Debt-Free Millennials channel, where we talk about all things to help you achieve financial confidence, crush debt that leads to more fun and fewer payments. I am so excited about this video because this one is sponsored by Monos Luggage, and I'm so excited about the sponsorship. But before we get into that, I want to talk about all of the things that goes into the holiday season because it's not just gifts. Don't forget about things like holiday cards and stamps. I kid you not, I just looked up on USPS that stamps cost $0.66 per stamp. So that in and of itself, if you're sending out to a large list, can add up quickly to over $100. Then you have gift wrap, maybe you want to update your decor, and food is always a big budget item, especially if you are cooking or maybe you are going in with family members and you're adding in more things, it still adds up. And let's not forget about holiday travel. That is a big one and one that Kyle and I have done almost every year since we moved out to California. We do typically travel back to the holidays. And I want to give a special shout out to our sponsor, Monos, for sponsoring this video. Let's check it out. In 2014, on the 4th of July, I wasn't in America. I wasn't wearing red, white, and blue, and certainly wasn't lighting fireworks off into the night sky. But to be clear, there were fireworks. I had traveled to Zurich, Switzerland, where my boyfriend proposed to me next to Lake Zurich under a brilliant night sky. He gave me a journal and told me, this is our adventure journal. I want you to fill the pages with the many adventures we will go on as husband and wife. I've always been fascinated with our planet and the way people live. Since I was a kid, I had dreamed of visiting faraway places and knew two things had to be in order to fulfill this part of my life. My finances and well-made travel gear. When I stumbled across Monos, it became clear that they are more than a company that makes luggage. Their philosophy is all about traveling mindfully. As Monos puts it, travel is what you make of it. For some, it's an escape from everyday life, but for others, it's a chance to grow and learn. To explore places near and far with wonder and curiosity, with gratitude and graciousness. To greet the world with open eyes and arms and an open mind and heart. We founded Monos with these travelers in mind because we are these travelers too. When I was shopping for a new luggage set, I knew it needed to be durable, easy to use and reasonably priced. And Monos not only checks those boxes, they are also one of the first luggage brands to be climate neutral certified, which means they measure, offset and reduce their carbon emissions in every aspect of their business operations. Achieving financial confidence allowed me to explore more parts of this earth and Monos makes it possible for me to travel with ease. My Monos luggage not only holds the items I need to feel comfortable during my travels, it's also the container that brings a piece of my travels back home. Click the link in the description box for 10% off your Monos purchase by using code debt free millennials at checkout. Thank you so much Monos for sponsoring this video. And I also want to talk about in relation to not just really amazing luggage, but how you are utilizing your wallet to get you to travel and utilizing things like credit cards. So when it comes to the holidays, I love cashing in the amount of points that I've been accumulating over the year using my Chase Sapphire preferred card. There are a ton of different credit card companies that have really robust reward programs. I specifically like this one because it favors travel and you can actually redeem those points for travel to for the holidays, going back home, taking flights to really cool places. And also another really good benefit of this particular point system is that you can actually link it to your Amazon account and pay for Amazon purchases directly with your points. So there's none of this, well, I have to convert it into cash, let it hit my bank account or somehow redeem the points for gift cards. There's none of that. So it seamlessly links with Amazon, which is really, really a nice feature. So I like to hoard up those points throughout the year. And then at the end of the year, when I'm doing my Christmas shopping, this is a way that I can cash in a second way to use a point system is the fetch rewards app. The fetch rewards app is really great because you can take any physical or digital receipt, scan it, upload it into the app, and then you accumulate points. And then you can redeem those points for gift cards to big retailers like Amazon targets, Starbucks, Marshalls, TJ Maxx, Dick's sporting goods, just to name a few. Then you can either hand out gift cards as Christmas gifts, or you can use those gift cards and actually buy your Christmas gifts with them. I love utilizing this app. I've used it for years. I think it's amazing. And so between the credit card points and fetch rewards app, you can't go wrong and it gets you out of spending from your budget and spending with points instead. My second hack for you when it comes to holiday shopping, especially is to utilize Facebook groups that are running advertisements within these groups. And so I want to show you two of them that I'm a part of that I think are doing an amazing job because they're not only giving you deals from specific retailers, it's a list of retailers. And typically what I see is they favor a lot of home decor, kids, clothing and toys, moms, moms, groups, women's clothing and, and shoes and all that that actually they just have a whole bunch of stuff. So let me show you. This first one is called save and share deals. It has close to a million members in this. Actually one of my sorority sisters put this together. So shout out to Kristen for putting this one together. I think this is so awesome. So what she's done is she's actually curated a list of different items that might be on sale, whether it be Amazon, Walmart, target, whatever, maybe some other retailer, and then she'll add posts into the group so that you can see exactly what's going on now. Perhaps there's a flash sale that you just don't know about or you don't get onto these retail stores regularly. You're not shopping online regularly. This is just a really easy way to scroll deals that are happening either the day of or the week of. And so you can hop on some really amazing sales for Christmas gifts like, Oh my gosh, what is this? GE stand mixers and kitchen aid mixers. See there you go. And this just was posted 37 minutes ago. I would have not known about this had they not posted inside of this Facebook group. Anytime that they find deals, they'll go ahead and list it here. And of course, you know, some of these deals, they're posting their affiliate links, but affiliate links don't actually affect your cost at all. In fact, it's just a way for content creators and other affiliate marketers to get a little bit of a commission based off of whatever that cost was. So that's a really amazing way for everybody to have a triple win there. So save and share deals is the first one. And then the other one that I'm a part of, which has close to 500, 400,000 members over 400,000 members is the mommy markdown. I've had a lot of mom friends recommend this group to me. It does look like only admins can post in here, but everybody can comment and respond to the post. So a lot of times there are things like for you to wear. So this one looks like it's a jacket or like a sweatshirt of some sort. Uh, Oh my gosh, air pods, two generation down to $89. That's amazing. So you can see there's a lot of people who comment on these things and you can quickly like holiday pajamas. I was just talking about this, Kyle and I love getting holiday pajamas. So this is really cool. There you go. You can find your family set and you can get them for 50% off. This is why I love utilizing these Facebook groups. And I think a lot of people don't even think of this as an avenue for ways to save on your holiday gift shopping. Okay. The third point that I want to make here is that there are, can be several options in how you want to buy gifts for your immediate family. Or perhaps, you know, you're married, you have kids and now you're coming back and maybe your sibling has a kid or you know, you want to spend money on your in-laws and your parents and it just gets to be a lot of people. There are a couple of different ways that you can do this one on my husband's side of the family. What we like to do is secret Santa. So we each pull a name from out of a hat and then we only shop for that one person. And typically we cap this at around $25 per person for that gift. So you have to spend less than $25 to make it even for everybody. Now typically now that there are kids involved, kids, you know, still get gifts from everybody because they're kids. But for the adults, this is a great way to just minimize the pressure that you might feel to buy for everybody. On my side of the family, what we typically do is my sister will put together a shared document online where we can all input what we would like to have on our Christmas wish list. It could be a big item, a small item. It doesn't matter. So long as you get those items listed early so that you can shop good deals during black Friday or cyber Monday, you can shop those deals early so that you can get that Christmas gift wishlist checked and complete. You can also set budgets for each member of your family that you're shopping for or a friend so you could set that budget to $25 like we did or you can bump it up to $50 per person. That way you kind of have a benchmark of how much you're spending on each individual and it feels like you're not catering to one person overall. I'm all about fairness. I'm all about balance. So if I'm thinking about this for my family, then I want to think about strategically how much money I can give to each person unless you see a really amazing Christmas gift and by all means. Another thing that you can do, and I know we're getting really close to the holidays like crunch shopping season is to just simply budget for it all year round. Kyle and I have a gifts category inside of our budget and so every single month we're putting I think interesting question, Siri, that is an interesting question. Yes. To put it in our holiday budget, the gifts. So what you do is we put like $200 per month and you can make it less. You can make it more depending on how much you really value gift giving and then set aside that money every single month inside of your budget. You can actually put this into a high yield savings account and earn even more money over 4% and put it in something like ally where you can organize it using savings buckets and create a saving bucket called Christmas or holidays and then you can just pull that money out when the time comes and it makes it so much less stressful. And lastly, I want to talk about sentimental gifts, AKA homemade, but I don't like using the word homemade because I feel like people get cringy about that word because they're like, Oh, it's something I could throw away. Sentimental gifts are not something you throw away. It is something you cherish and put in your sentimental box and it's a keepsake that you'll have for a long time. I challenge you to think about something sentimental that you could do for a loved one this Christmas that doesn't have to cost a lot of money. And I'll give you an example. When my daughter was born in 2021, what we ended up doing is we got those clay ornament kits that you can make and we did her footprint and her handprint and made ornaments for our families. That's a sentimental gift that will last a lifetime and people aren't going to throw that away. Grandma's going to keep that on her tree every single year and she's going to remember that as a really amazing gift and time of year in our lives. Another idea that you could do that I got from my mom is my mom actually made these little recipe cards from our family recipes. So both of my grandmothers, my aunt, my mom, all of these family recipes that we've been utilizing over the years, she actually just curated into these little note cards and put it on a little ring, printed them out. It was super cute. I still have it here in my kitchen. I use it frequently. And what's cool about that gift is that she can add new recipe cards throughout the year or for another Christmas. And so it's something that I can continue to hold onto and it holds value for me because these are recipes that I don't want to forget and that I want to utilize. And then also side note when it comes to kids, because this is my season of life right now, having a toddler is you got to think about quality versus quantity with gifts. And so I actually learned this from my best friend's dad, shout out to big daddy because he said in the beginning, when you have kids and Christmas gifts, it's quantity over quality. The younger they are, the more gifts they like to just unwrap. They love the idea of unwrapping gifts. And so you don't need to give them quality high end gifts because they're more interested in just unwrapping things. So you could literally wrap each an individual book or toy or piece of candy, whatever it may be. They just love the act of unwrapping gifts. And so as they get older and when you become an adult, quality gifts, more high end gifts tend to be the ones that you're like, Ooh, this is really great. And you're not so much interested in the volume of gifts, just a little trick. So you literally can go to the dollar section of target. You can go to the dollar tree, you can just wrap up all of these really amazing, but budget friendly gifts where your kids and they're going to go nuts over them. I hope you got some tips and ideas on how you can hack your holiday budget this season. And don't forget, if you want to have a really amazing travel experience and do it with a luggage, a piece of luggage that is actually going to protect your belongings and your valuables, don't forget to check out Monos and you get 10% off at checkout by using the code debt free millennials by clicking the link below in the description box. Hope you liked this one. Give it a big thumbs up and I'll catch you in the next video.