Money management over the holidays.

The Christmas holidays are a crazy time of year, where for two weeks or so all the normal rules go out the window and we eat too much, spends too much, and lose all our renovations.

We get a lot of contact in January from people doing mortgage top ups to pay off the Christmas, and my EAP counselling for the first couple of months of the year, has a massive upswing in debt and budget management issues due to Christmas.

So what to do? Ideally you can following our plans during the year, and already have money set aside in your Christmas fund to pay for the time off. If you do then others are not going crazy, you won't have any issues.

If however you haven't quite managed to save for the extra spending, and make sure you do a budget, build in what additional spending you are going to do, or wish to do, and then work out what other bills (not regular bills like the power bill, I mean bills like saving for a holiday or extra payments on the debt), you can leave off until you are through the holiday period. It's not ideal, but if we're being honest and are going to spend the money anyway, submitted a plan for it to reduce the deficit you going to end up with, and putting a head in the sand.

And in January make sure you have downloaded the DUX article on presence planning so that you have the full year to get ready for Christmas 2020 don't have to go through any financial stress again.