Surviving the Financial Stress of the Festive Season
O holy night, my bank account is crying
Christmas is one of my favourite times of year, it’s a time for big turkeys, fairy lights and cosy pyjamas. It’s a season to spend time with your family and friends too. But there’s always one thing at the back of my mind at Christmas – how I’m going to afford presents for the people around me.
I love gift giving. I love the look on people’s faces when they open the present that I have been dying to tell them about since November. It’s a way of letting your loved ones know that you appreciate them, as well as how well you know them. It’s a satisfying feeling when they rip off the wrapping paper and see that perfume that they had been banging on about for ages. But since I am at University, I always have to be careful with how much I spend.
As a student, my day-to-day financial worries are always amplified when Christmas is around the corner. From midnight on the 1st of November, I’m logging onto every single one of my online banking apps to see how much money I have to spare. Unsurprisingly, it never usually looks too good, and then the annual dread of spending money on Christmas presents takes over.
It’s not that I am reluctant on spending money on my family and friends, I would spend all my money on them if I could. It’s just when you don’t have a full-time job and can barely squeeze in a shift at work between the amount of university work you have, you can’t really go out and buy them an £800 Gucci watch.
The thing about trying to spend as little as possible on family and friends is that you don’t want them to take offence. With most gifts, you can roughly tell how much it cost a person. I mean, you wouldn’t look at a pair of Primark pyjamas and think they were 60 quid – you just know they were about £10. My fear is that when my sister takes off that wrapping paper and sees those pyjamas, she’ll think “Is that it?”.
Luckily, I know that my loved ones aren’t going to complain about how much I spent on them, or what I managed to buy them with my scraped-up pennies. They understand that financially times are tough – especially since I am a student. But of course, there is always going to be that underlying fear anyways.
As well as that, most of my close friends have gone into work full time straight after they left university, but I decided to carry on and study a Master’s. Disclaimer, I don’t regret my decision, but my bank account is wondering if I really thought it through. Now, I’m worried that my friends are going to spend loads of their well-earned money on me, and I won’t be able to spend as much on them. I don’t want them thinking that their friendship doesn’t mean as much to me as it does to them because they are going to spend £50, and I can only spend £20.
And I am definitely not alone when it comes to worrying about Christmas - as illustrated by the fact that out of a survey of 2,000 people (conducted by Yelp and commissioned by OnePoll) they found that 28% of people had gone into debt during the festive season. The financial stress of the festive season is a tangible and insidious one - and it does have long-lasting impacts.
But Christmas shouldn’t be a time to worry about where you are financially. It should be an exciting time to relax and unwind, a time where you can get together and not overthink the gifts you are giving people. Like myself, if you’re struggling to be money smart, there are ways around it.
One thing that I always find helps with gift giving is secret Santa. It makes the whole process a lot of fun and means you don’t have to spend loads of money on individual people. I’ve done secret Santa a few times, and it means you have an excuse to get together to have a takeaway and a few drinks with your pals.
Another way is to set a good old fashioned spend limit – that way nobody will feel like their gift isn’t up to par with the one they will receive. It makes the everything fair, and I find it always relieves the underlying anxieties I feel leading up to the 25th.
Everyone is going to have some financial worries leading up to Christmas – student or not. It is a shame that the festive season gets tainted by the stress of spending money. Christmas is a time that should be spent zoning out and watching Jim Carrey eat glass in The Grinch, not worrying if those Primark pyjamas were a good enough gift.
Written by Emma Richardson
Hi! My name is Emma and I’m from Northumberland – currently living in Nottingham. I’m studying a Master’s in Magazine Journalism at Nottingham Trent University, and I would love to work in editorial. I’m a huge fan of Cosmopolitan, Harry Styles, and mojitos, as well as daydreaming about one day going to visit Colorado.
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