It’s this time of the year that the shops start to put their decorations up, and you start getting thousands of mail-outs in the post (or thousands of emails from online shops).
It’s a great time of the year – isn’t it? Or is it? Well - for some people it’s not so great. It’s the time of the year when you have to fork out a lot of money (for gift shopping, for food shopping or for decoration shopping) – and if you don’t have the money – you can really get yourself in trouble. Especially – if you need to be paying the bills at the same time (and the bills always seem to come right when you don’t need them!).
You want to be able to give your kids, your friends, & your family the best Christmas possible. You want to be able to shop for awesome gifts that will make their mouths fall open. You want to be able to lay out the best service possible – turkey, ham, roast meats, roast vegetables, trifle, pavlova, the works… And most importantly – you want to give them a Christmas to remember.
But – the power bill & the phone bill are also due this week - so… what do you do? Well of course you have to pay the power bill, so the decorations, food & gifts will just have to wait…
There are some ways to get around the problems though:
They always say you could get the kids involved – get them to make their own crackers, & decorations. But - I'm not going to pretty this "saying" up - generally this method will cost you more. You will pay around $2 for a six pack of crackers down the road. If you do this separately - , you have to buy the snaps (the centre bits that go BANG) , the paper for making them, the trinkets to put inside them, the paper to fill the crackers out etc…? Sure - you can get the kids involved - just do it wisely - they can make cards out of paper (with felt-tip pens etc) - but fancy things are generally more expensive than at the shops - remember that.
You could get cheaper meats (chicken instead of turkey etc..), sides (potatoes instead of kumara), and deserts (bread & butter pudding instead of trifle) – but is this something you want to do? If you normally have a “traditional Christmas”, it is sure to be a let-down if you have lesser foods.
And… you could get smaller pressies – there is nothing wrong with this – you could buy a whole sack of $2 pressies (or even $10 pressies), and the kids would enjoy them (maybe not your teenagers – but the young ones will never know the difference).
So – what do you do? You just have to spend the money unfortunately. There are two ways to do this:
a) Get your friends & family to contribute some money and have a co-joint christmas experience (we personally do this & it works out great – we have a “family” Christmas where everyone contributes something).
b) Get a loan, or a cash advance. There are several companies that will do this - so you can do plenty of online shopping for gifts, food & decorations. Just do a google search for "apply for loan online" or "apply for cash advance", and you will see lots of companies willing to help you out. Of course, you should try to avoid this measure. It's just going to end up getting you in more debt. If you are just looking for something to tide you over (until you get the next pay cheque), by all means - go for the cash advance. But the loaning of money is dangerous, so be very careful!
So in closing, yes – there are options for xmas! Just make sure you make it a good one, and most of all - enjoy it!
