4

Finding the Cash

You’ve made a commitment that you will not spend more money than you have. So no matter what the date, it’s time to get prepared for a no-debt, paid-in-full Christmas. Ready?

Raise your right hand (or hands if you’re doing this as a family, which would be such a great idea!) and repeat after me: I am [we are] fully committed not to incur debt to pay for any aspect of the Christmas holiday celebration. I [we] will not be guided by guilt or obligation and will do whatever it takes to keep all expenses well within the amount of money I [we] have to spend.

Place this written no-debt commitment in a prominent place in your home. The refrigerator door is a good place where the entire family will see it often. If you think of your goal in a positive and upbeat manner, your children will catch your enthusiasm and determination too.

You should be very proud of yourself. Perhaps for the first time you will be able to take the stress and dread out of the holidays. And even if you don’t have time to implement every good idea in this book this year, you’ll have a huge head start when you begin the New Year with a plan already in place for next Christmas.

Where’s the Money?

Need to raise some cash quickly so you can avoid new debt this coming holiday season? No matter the date on the calendar, start crash saving right now. You’ll be amazed at how much dough you can accumulate in a hurry.

Because you now have your holiday spending plan (or you will shortly—I have faith), you need to see that total amount as your savings goal.

Let’s say you’ve determined that you will need twelve hundred dollars to cover all of your intended holiday expenses. If it is now January, you’ll need to save one hundred dollars a month. That’s an easy calculation. If, however, it’s July, you’ll need to step that up to two hundred dollars or more to meet your goal.

I think I hear you muttering that you can’t do that. Really? Well, then you really can’t spend twelve hundred dollars for Christmas or any amount over the amount of cash you will have saved by then. Perhaps you need to reduce your holiday expenses to six hundred dollars or an amount to match the number of months that remain if you are limited to a one-hundred-dollars-per-month rate of savings.

“I understand your predicament, Mr. Claus, and it’s quite surprising to me that you even have a credit card, but I still need to see some ID.”

With your goal in place, it’s a lot easier to start stashing cash. Just start thinking creatively. Here are a few ideas to help you jump-start your savings.

Pantry survival. More than likely you have enough food in your pantry, cupboards, and freezer to feed your family for at least a week or two. Skip the grocery store for a couple of weeks, eat what you already have, and stash the grocery money.

Eat in. If time is short, consider an extreme approach. No more fast food or restaurants between now and Christmas. Put the money you would have spent on fast food and eating out into your holiday stash.

Just water. If you do eat out, bribe yourself. When you order water only and skip the pricey beverages, slip two bucks into your stash.

Rethink a habit. We could all cut back or eliminate a few spending habits with little lasting impact on our lives. You don’t have to eliminate the daily coffees, vending machine snacks, manicures, and pedicures altogether. Just think them through, make some cost-cutting adjustments, and consciously put the savings into your holiday stash on a regular basis. Do you really need to eat lunch out every day? Cut it back to two days, brown bag the other three, and stash the money you don’t spend.

Coins and small bills. Every evening deposit the coins in your pocket or purse into a central collection spot. Ditto for the one-dollar bills and five-dollar bills. Make this a family affair and you’ll accumulate cash even faster.

Expense account reimbursements. If you travel as part of your job or use your own funds in other ways for work, you probably get reimbursed by your company later. When you receive the reimbursement checks, don’t even think about spending them. Instead, add the money to your holiday stash.

Coupons, refunds, and rebates. When you receive a refund or rebate for the purchase of a product at the supermarket or through the mail, don’t spend it. Stash it in your special fund. At the grocery store, have all of your purchases subtotaled and write your check or swipe your debit card for this amount. Then have the checker reduce the total by your qualified coupons and receive those savings back in cash. Make sure you do not commingle the savings with your pocket cash. Then place the amount—no matter how small—into your stash.

Forgotten gift cards. Pool all family members’ forgotten/neglected gift cards that are languishing in the bottom of drawers, purses, and wallets. Add them to the holiday stash.

My Christmas Club. There was a time when banks everywhere offered Christmas Club savings accounts for customers. A customer would fill out an authorization instructing the bank (or in some cases his or her employer) to automatically transfer a set amount from each paycheck to a savings account to be held specifically for Christmas shopping. Then at Thanksgiving a tidy sum of money would come in the mail—cash for Christmas. As little as ten dollars a week would result in a check for five hundred dollars. Just because most banks have long since discontinued their Christmas Club programs doesn’t mean you can’t create your own.

A little moonlight. Overtime, odd jobs, perhaps even a second job are all ways to create the cash you’ll need for Christmas. Provided you are diligent to always stash those small additional incomes, you’ll quickly accumulate the money you need to go all-cash.

Adjust tax withholding. This is delicate, so hear me out. If you routinely receive a refund when you file your income taxes, it means you are having too much money withheld from your paycheck. You are in essence giving the federal government an interest-free loan. You send in way too much money and tell them to keep what they need and send you a refund next year. That doesn’t make much sense to me. If this is your situation, consider changing your withholding by filling out a new form with your employer and adjusting the number of exemptions you claim so that your withholding more closely resembles the amount of taxes you owe. But don’t get used to the new amount. Arrange to automatically deposit the difference into your stash.

You’ll be amazed how much cash you can accumulate in as little time as three or four weeks—money that might have otherwise leaked out of your life undetected. Determine to limit your holiday spending to just the cash you have and you’ll give yourself an incredible gift: no new debt to follow you into the New Year!

More Cash-Saving Ideas

Here are more cash-saving ideas contributed by faithful fans and clever readers of the Debt-Proof Living newsletter:

	In order for everyone to be involved in saving for Christmas, we decorate a container with Christmas paper, glue the lid down, and make a slit in the top. At each person’s pay period, he or she makes a set contribution and says a prayer for our debt-free holiday. Additional contributions can be made anytime during the year, with the only condition that a prayer must accompany the contribution. At Thanksgiving we break open the account and make our decisions on how we will spend the money. This is a great way to help children prioritize, and it gives meaning to a budget.
	Starting now, once a month put twenty dollars into an envelope for a service person you want to remember with a tip during the holidays. Label, seal, and don’t forget where you put it.
	Say no to credit come-ons. Don’t even think about using those convenience checks often issued by banks and credit-card companies during the holiday season. Writing out one of those checks is equivalent to getting a cash advance, which may mean paying steep transaction fees and interest that is generally higher than that for purchases. Also, resist offers to skip a payment. It may sound like an unexpected gift from your bank or credit-card company, but don’t be fooled. Interest will accumulate on your unpaid balance, so next month your balance will be even higher.
	Don’t fall for the ploy to get 10 or 15 percent off when you apply for a store’s credit card. Don’t even think about that. The inquiry alone is not worth the potential one-time savings because your credit score will be negatively impacted. And you do not need the temptation of putting any holiday purchases on plastic.
	Use a small expandable folder (like you might use for supermarket coupons) to hold your holiday cash. Label each section with the names of your recipients. In each section, keep a list of ideas for that person, the cash you plan to spend on them, and receipts once the items are purchased. If a gift needs to be returned, you’ll know exactly where the receipt is. You can use this “wallet” year-round to purchase birthday or other holiday gifts, to collect ideas for next Christmas, and to keep you on the debt-proof track.
	Here is a painless way to accumulate cash for the holidays. Start each month with a zero balance in your checkbook (don’t carry over your balance from last month). Don’t pay attention to how much you’re “forgetting.” You won’t believe how quickly it adds up!
	To raise cash for holiday shopping, we play “The Pantry Game” in our house. We pretend we’re stranded on a desert island and the only nourishment we have is what is presently in the pantry, refrigerator, and freezer. There’s no way we will be rescued for a week. It becomes a challenge to create meals from our precious resources. Our motivation? The grocery money that week goes into the holiday stash. We went for a full two weeks one time, buying only milk during our “ordeal.”
	I purchase twenty-five-dollar gift cards from both Walmart and Toys “R” Us on the fifteenth of each month of the year. I put the cards in a safe place. I don’t give these gift cards as gifts, but instead I use them to do my Christmas shopping at those two stores. You can do this at just about any store these days. Gift cards are a great way for me to save for Christmas shopping because I am not prone to borrow back that money or to spend those gift cards for other things.
	Place a festively decorated jar in a prominent place in your house to remind you to collect spare change for those in need.

It was the Christmas of 1998, and my mother was very ill and unable to go out and shop for Christmas. She hadn’t been out of the house for anything other than doctor visits for the previous several years. Nonetheless, on Christmas morning under the Christmas tree there was a plain white envelope with “Johnny” scrawled on it in her handwriting. In the envelope was an old, crumpled ten-dollar bill.

Thinking back on that now, I realize that that ten-dollar bill was the most wonderful gift I had ever received as a Christmas present. That old bill must have been stuffed back in her purse for years—“saved for a rainy day,” as she would have put it. Apparently, she was aware that her “rainy day” had come, because that was her last Christmas with us. This memory has been my own private Christmas joy for the years since she died.

John W., Texas

At my church, we raise money for our annual Easter party by holding a pre-Christmas children’s flea market. We ask the children and parents of our congregation to consider donating some of their like-new, unused, or unopened toys to our flea market. We emphasize that the children should be the ones to decide which toys they will give, with the help of their parents. We collect the toys over two weeks, arrange them on tables by age group or category, and hold a big flea market in the beginning of December, in time for the Christmas rush.

We think it is a win-win situation for everyone concerned. Kids in our church learn to give, parents get to declutter the house and make room for the inevitable new toys, anyone looking for a deal gets a great bargain, and the church gets help funding the Easter party!

Andrea H., New Jersey