Yes, I've gone and said the 'C' word! I LOVE Christmas and spend months planning and organising gifts, decorations and I even run the office secret Santa each year. We dont really go over board. We set a spending limit for close family and as we now have little J we have agreed with some friends that we will just buy for the little ones now rather than each other plus other halves as well. I don't want to cut back on our real tree (this may be a mistake in hindsight with a 'soon to be walker' in our house) or the nice food and drink we buy so I've decided to try and make it cost neutral.
I save £75 a month for birthday and Christmas and have built up about £300 so far this year. My aim is to use the cost neutral Christmas so I can put this extra cash into the overpayment pot. So far I have:
£220 cashback from credit card
£65 Nectar vouchers
£10 Morrisons vouchers
£2 Coop voucher
£44.25 Quidco cashback
Total - £342.25
I'm rather pleased with this, although we are limited to some shops/websites with some of the vouchers I think we could probably manage most of the festivities with this!
Roll on December!
M
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Ooh, you're doing well! I'd never thought about it being " cost neutral" We do the same as you but also pay £3 a week into a christmas club run by my mother in law so we have an extra £150 at the end of November, that's our good bill covered! Although we have started thinking that we could cut back significantly as its only a few days! We should do a catch up post in December to see how we've done! :-)
ReplyDeleteI must say that we've been saving some of these for more than a year, so we may not be able to have a repeat performance next year!
DeleteIt would be great to see how we're doing in December. It will keep me focused (she says as she registers for a billion survey sites...)
M
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