Fighting the Pressure to Overspend on Holiday Gifts
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With your money briefing, I'm J.R. Whelan at The Wall Street Journal in New York. The holiday season is a fun time of year. What's not fun is feeling the smoldering, burning hole in your wallet from overspending on gifts. The pressure to spend more than you're able to spend is real. And bank rate analyst Adrian Garcia is here with some pretty revealing details about that frustration and how to relieve that feeling of pressure. So Adrian, Thanksgiving ushers in the season of giving, but a bank rate survey found that 31 million Americans would just as well skip gift giving altogether?
Yes, there's 13% of us are doing what I'm calling the nuclear option and just boycotting gifts. They're going to skip gift exchange and decide to spend the holidays celebrating in a different way. That's no fun. It's smart, though.
I guess they're saving money. You know, it was interesting in your survey, women feel more pressure than men to spend the holidays, but they wind up being wiser shoppers.
That's right. It's interesting. Women are taking on more stress around the holidays. They're worried about getting gifts for everyone on their list. But they're also out there looking for sales. They're participating in days like Black Friday. They're going to log on on Cyber Money at rates more often than men say they're willing to do. And I saw another survey that said men are actually expected to spend more this year than women are.
I guess that the really booming economy and higher wages and more consumer confidence is playing a role in this. Yes.
Our survey is a snapshot in time, but every indicator I can see out there, like the National Retail Federation, said this is supposed to be a record year of spending. So there's a lot of push to go out there and spend a lot of money, which could be stressing some people out.
You know, millennials are smart gift givers as well. They feel pressure to spend, but the idea of giving secondhand items is on the table.
Yeah, that kind of makes sense. If you think about the whole thrift store movement and things like that. And a lot of these thrift stores have kind of curated collections.
How many Americans would consider skipping holiday gift giving and why?
So millennials, I think, are more comfortable going into a setting like that and maybe picking out a gift for friends and family than maybe some of the older generations who have some stigma about places like that.
So what about wealthier Americans? Do they have it any easier during the holidays? And what's the key to avoiding a spending trap? We'll have more with Bankrate's Adrian Garcia right after this.
We're back with Adrian Garcia from Bankrate. You know, Adrian, you'd think that wealthier Americans would have no problem spending during the holidays, but the Bankrate survey says otherwise.
Yeah, basically we all feel stress across the board, which is kind of nice. It's a great unifier. But we found that those who earn more than $75,000 a year, 41% of those still feel stress about spending more than they're comfortable with. That's actually the lowest number on the list. Those who earn less than $30,000 also feeling a little bit less stress. 47% of those said they felt like they were going to spend more than they're comfortable with. But it's those middle income earners who are really feeling the pressure during this holiday season. And it sounds kind of Grinch-like, but let's not knock regifting too much. Yeah, I think the thing about regifting, and only about less than a quarter of us are considering that option, but you just need to be tactful, you need to be considerate, you need to take off the tag if it says it was to you, and you need to make sure that they didn't give you the gift.
Right, if your name is John, you're giving it to a guy named Ken, then yeah.
That might be a clue that you're participating in regifting, which is you shouldn't know that you're being regifted to or that they're receiving a regift.
But if it's new to Ken, you're all good. Exactly. So this all begs the question, how can people better prepare themselves, not just financially, but also mentally, to avoid feeling compelled to overspend or fall into an overspending trap?
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