There’s something about Christmas. It’s a time of giving, being happy etc.
And of spending money.
There were some figures in the papers last week, from research by the Halifax.
They said that why we spend is:
Wanted a perfect Christmas 41%
Lost control of spending 16%
Last-minute panic buying 13%
Wanted to spend same as friends 4%
And how we paid for it
From December salary 67%
Savings 34%
Other 20%
Overdraft 14%
Store card 12%
Borrowed from friends 10%
Payday loan 7%
If that’s true, then 43% go into debt to pay for Christmas (I’d guess it’s higher, realistically) and exactly the same proportion wanted a “perfect” Christmas.
So what would be perfect? Wouldn’t it actually be spending it with friends, rather than competing with them or borrowing from them?
I did a video interview about it
You might find it interesting that I was interviewed before Christmas (hence the Remembrance Day Poppy in my button-hole). But I made the points that came out in the research in the following January about why people spend, what they spend it on and where they get the money.
You might want to skip over the brief commercial break after about 23 minutes, but stay with it as we carried on the interview from 24 until the 36 minute mark.
Incidentally, I was on the same show a few months before,
You might notice that Chrissy (the hostess) pronounced my name wrongly, and that I use my hands to emphasise points so I look like a tik-tak man at the races. We both learned from that!
But with newspapers and banks echoing what I say, albeit three months late, It is getting obvious that working out what you really want first (such as, what is your perfect Christmas?) is a better way than trying to spend “sensibly” when you don’t really know what on earth you want.
