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‘Tis the season for spending…
In the flurry and fun, we often give ourselves a free pass through the holidays and throw everything we love into the cart: gifts for the Angel Tree and gifts for the kids, but also cute decorations, glittery soap containers, and packs of paper plates and napkins adorned with reindeer and snowflakes. Plus, maybe a beautiful Christmas themed magazine at the checkout and a pile of extra giftcards just in case.
And that’s just one stop at Target.
The season is most certainly engineered to extract maximum dollars out of American consumers. And not because all these things actually add substantially to our enjoyment of the holidays. Instead, we know financial stress detracts from this joy.
There are a lot of strategies to help alleviate overspending during this heightened time. Today I want to share one that I call “culling the cart.” It’s learning to just cut something.
This is a practice I use routinely, but it’s particularly magical at Christmastime.
Simply look over everything that’s in the cart when you get to checkout, and make a quick prioritization of the contents. Then cull out the lowest priority stuff, whether it’s your lowest priority gifts or food or clothes. I hand such items to the cashier if I’m too far away to put it away myself, and kindly mention that I’d changed my mind. Or in a virtual cart, simply click delete.
Culling your cart during this particular time of year is highly effective at removing all kinds of extra that plagues and distracts us throughout the season. With this simple step, we can help reduce the ever-present refrain of “too much stuff” and “too much food” and “too much money” that we all feel throughout the season.
If you consider the 80/20 rule, only 20% of what we’re buying provides 80% of our festive experience anyway. And that means you could cull the other 80% of your shopping and still have 80% of your usual level of Christmas joy. That may sound a bit overly “quantified” for a season about giving and grace, but you can check the principle:
Make a list of what truly makes Christmas Christmas for you and your family (or other holiday you’re celebrating this December). Now make a list of all the stuff you’ll buy to make that happen (and all the stuff you know will wind up in your cart in the process). Now find the short list (20%) on your shopping list that is responsible for most of your joy list.
Do you see it? There’s a lot of spending that is for genuinely fun stuff, but much of the fun stuff it is simply icing on the cake.
It isn’t worth it to go into debt or strain your savings for icing on the cake.
Focus on what gives you the 80% return and cull the rest with confidence.
I hope you enjoyed this edition of Under 2, an email series designed to share quick bites of wisdom to empower your financial journey (while keeping it short). Be sure to sign-up below to get these messages in your inbox.
All for now,
Lindsey