It’s during the holiday season that we mostly find ourselves spending too much on everything such as travel, gifts, clothes, food and many more. This is probably due to the sales and promotions fever throughout the holiday seasons. We, Malaysians are blessed with an abundance of sales occasion every year. Sometimes, it’s difficult for us to avoid these crazy sales during the holiday promotions through online and offline shopping.

Thus, in order to avoid ourselves from overspending during the holiday seasons, here are a few ways on how to keep your spending under control and you can still enjoy your holidays!

1. Track your spending

It’s crucial to track your spending during the holidays. If it’s difficult to keep track on your holiday expenses, you can always find and download an app on Expense Manager via Play Store. By using an Expense Tracker/Manager, you can simply track your expenses and budget effectively. You can easily categorize your holiday expenditures without intermingling with your other monthly expenses, or even day-to-day expenses. All you have to do is just be sure to remain diligent in updating and tracking your expenses instantly. This is to ensure that you will not lose track and be able to check your spending in real-time.

2. Carefully plan ahead

Another way for you to save money during the holidays is to always plan ahead, check and make savings for your own holiday savings account. You can always save a small amount of money to this account on a monthly basis. By the time you need it, you don’t have to stress out as you have your holiday savings account to play its role when you’re ready to commit yourself into holiday expenses. Nevertheless, it is better to set a budget for holiday expenses at the beginning of the year and list out all your holiday expenses carefully; travel/trip, gifts, entertainment, party, treats, etc. Thus, do create your own holiday savings account before the holiday seasons bump into you so that you’re able to plan ahead and spend your money wisely within your means.

3. Check your shopping list twice

Creating a shopping list is one of the shopping strategies that you need to apply if you decided to save money during the holiday seasons. Otherwise, you will end up splurging on things that you shouldn’t buy, and perhaps you might focus on your wants instead of your needs. Therefore, the vital trick is to check your shopping list twice on what you want to spend every time you go out for shopping. The best way is to go shopping with a list and do ensure that you make a check list. Of course, you definitely need to commit to it and follow your shopping list! =) That way, this will help you evade buying unnecessary things and escape you from spending haphazardly.

4.  Be grateful for what you have

Most of the times, we always think about the things that we don’t have in life. For instance, we tend to feel uneasiness and wonder when we are going to have dream vacations and own those luxury items. Although in life there are many issues and big worries that we need to encounter, we need to remember that our life has many blessings. We need to be thankful for what we have now such as a good health, happy family, having good friends and many more. According to Marcus Aurelius, “Do not indulge in dreams of having what you have not, but reckon up the chief of the blessings you do possess, and then thankfully remember how you would crave for them if they were not yours.” Suffice to say, do appreciate on things that we currently have at the moment because there are many things that we need to be thankful for in life. Therefore, don’t take anything that we have for granted.

5. Start doing an inventory check

It is better to start doing an inventory check once in a while. Sometimes, we may experience a situation in which we buy something twice without noticing that we already purchased it. Hence, let’s do an inventory check before deciding to spend your money during the holidays. This is to ensure that we will not buy the exact same things twice and to avoid having too much paraphernalia.

Hopefully, these tips will guide us on how to manage our finance effectively. By constantly making sure to implement these tips accordingly will help us to score debt free during any holiday seasons!