Five Ways to Start Saving Now for the Holidays

When is a good time to start saving for the year-end holidays? Any time, of course! Here are five ways to get started on your holiday shopping fund now.

Spare Change

Do you stop and get a cup of coffee on the way to work?  Buy lunch at the café down the street?  Get  candy bars from the vending machine?  Any time a small purchase is made with cash, there’s the inevitable change.  It’s annoying to have the stuff accumulate in the bottom of a purse or in the unused ashtray in the car.  Why not collect those coins?  Manage to put a minimum of just 25¢ each day and by the end of the year, you should have close to $100 put aside.

Transfer from Checking to Savings

Any time you write out a check or use your debit card, round up. In other words, if your groceries for the week were $109.27, enter it in the check register as $110. If the electric bill was $225.77, enter it as $226. If you average fifty transactions per month, and each one averages fifty cents, that’s $25 saved per month, or $300 per year.

Bank of America is well known for its checking account program called “Keep the Change,” based on the same premise. The account automatically rounds up each debit card purchase and automatically transfers the difference into your savings account. As an added bonus, the bank is currently matching 100% on all money saved during the first three months that you enroll in the program. Then the bank matches 25% thereafter, up to $250 per year. There are limitations, depending on the state you reside in, so go to www.bankofamerica.com for more information.

Windfalls 

We all get a few of those checks every year for one thing or another. Maybe you paid your doctor for a service, but so did the insurance company and received a check for the difference.  Perhaps you overpaid an insurance or utility bill and received a small check back for the mistake. Any time you an unexpected payment finds its way to your mailbox, put it in your holiday savings.  You never knew you had it coming, so you won’t miss it.

Pay Yourself

If you pay off a credit card or any other sort of loan, keep paying that monthly amount to yourself. Put the $50 you were paying on your Visa card bill into your savings account and divert some of it, if not all of it, into your holiday savings account.  

Sell Something

“One man’s junk is another man’s treasure,” or so the saying goes. Resell books and recent magazines to a used book store or on the Web.  Sell your family’s gently used clothing to a clothing exchange. Post an old collection or antiques on ebay or Craigslist and any proceeds can go to the holiday account. Once you start looking around the house, you'll be amazed at the number of items you aren't using. Sell them all and use the cash to pay for the holidays.

Use any one of these tips to have an extra hundred dollars or so put aside by the end of the year. Use all of the tips and  you could have a thousand dollars or more saved up. You'll be free of holiday spending pain and holiday debt.