Black Friday Deals - Are they really Life or Debt?

Black Friday deals- Are they really Life or Debt?

For some, the holidays are spent spending money on gifts, vacations, and parties. For most of us, it’s spent on transport home, getting through the months with fewer paid working days, and handling your family’s year-end expectations. It can be incredibly tough to balance these things when we don’t have the money on hand. The temptation to borrow money to spend on supposed deals can be overwhelming, with everyone talking about their awesome savings and their cool, new stuff. However, we are here to help you avoid the FOMO (fear of missing out) on Black Friday Deals because they aren’t really deals at all.

The pressure to buy starts as early as September. The decorations go up, the music starts, and we start to see the festive SALE signs going up in all our favourite shops. We get excited when we think about the things that we wanted but couldn’t afford until the price-cuts of Black Friday. While that is a great feeling, sometimes we need to remind ourselves that saving the money is better.

The problem is when you spend money you don’t have on things you also don’t need. This is the trap of festive overspending, and we have tips below to help you keep track of your money this holiday season.

First - How Much Can You Spend?

To keep yourself from overspending, figure out how much you need to spend on necessities before you do anything else. These are things that you can’t live without and could cause trouble if you don’t pay on time. Only then, if you have money left over, can you spend on extras like gifts, decorations, and entertainment. Once you find out how much you can afford without sacrificing the necessities, call this your budget. Stick to this budget and you won’t go into debt.

The better question is how much can you save?

Bargains, sales, and discounts all seem amazing during the holiday season, and we worry about missing these seemingly fantastic deals. Buying discounted items can be a great way to save during the holidays, but only if you really needed them in the first place. We think we are saving money, but if it’s not in the budget, it’s not money saved.

Think of it like this:
You go shopping for bread, milk and a broom. Your budget of R200 says you can spend R15 on bread, R20 on milk and you’ve worked out that you can afford the R150 for a broom, with R15 left over to save.

You see all the SALE signs and there is a special on brooms. The one you wanted is half price. If you buy it on special, you save R75. This is great, you get everything you need and come home with more left over than you had planned. You saved R90! The R75 on the broom plus the R15 you planned to save anyway.

The problem comes in when we see SALE signs for things we don’t need and didn’t want until we saw they were 50% off. Now instead of bread, milk and a broom, we come home with a fancy kettle that we don’t need but bought anyway because it was marked down from R400 to R200.

Are you thinking “But I saved R200 on that kettle!”? If you are, you’re not alone. In fact, there is no money saved there. We have been taught over the years that “50% off” automatically means that we have saved 50% of the marked price. We did not. We spent R200, saved nothing and still have no bread, no milk, and a dirty floor.

What that “Save 50%” means is this: If you planned to buy this item for R200, you can spend R100 on the item and put the R100 left over in your savings, rather than spending it on other stuff! This applies whether your budget is R200 or R20 000, whether it's a kettle or a car, the result is the same.

We hear it so often that we can’t believe it’s not a saving. If you’re wondering how this happened, it’s a combination of us wanting things and retailers wanting to sell us those things. It is difficult, because it’s a nice feeling to buy what we want, but we have become too attached to that rush.

When you watch the videos of the crowds swarming to buy at Black Friday sales, thousands of people spending money and getting stuff they don’t need, be secure in the knowledge that you’re not missing out at all. So save your cash, and don’t fall for Black Friday hype

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