How much money will you be spending on presents this Christmas? According to the various news releases that have landed on the Money desk over the past few weeks, if you are Mr or Mrs average it could be £142, or £311, or any one of a seemingly random series of numbers in between. It seems nearly every bank and financial services company has carried out some kind of survey, and none of them have come out with the same answer.
But I guess that's hardly surprising. If you asked people at the start of the month what they were planning to spend in total, they would probably have come up with a fairly rational figure. Allocating, say, £20 a head to each person and multiplying that by the number of people they were buying for.
But as the run up to the big day gets shorter, and the high street more frenzied, the actual spending starts to rise. Ask someone on Christmas Eve what they expect to spend - as they prepare to panic buy over-priced toiletries or spend top whack on an iPod nano because they've left it too late to shop around - and the average will probably be much higher.
And it won't just be those people who have left all their shopping to the last minute who see their budget go out of the window. Even the most organised of us can find ourselves buying last-minute gifts that we wouldn't look twice at at any other time of year. A glass stiletto filled with fake Baileys perhaps? Would anyone ever buy that if they weren't caught up in a festive frenzy?
A couple of years ago I got food poisoning a week before Christmas. It was pretty depressing at the time, but it had one upside: it stopped me making that one last trip to the shops to get those extra "bits and pieces" for the folks.
I think it's a bit drastic to recommend salmonella as an antidote to last-minute Christmas splurges, but there are other ways to avoid ending up at the shops. How about inviting friends round or making mince pies?
Not going shopping on the way back from a boozy Christmas lunch is another way to limit excess spending, as is taking some cash out then leaving cards at home so you can't be tempted to spend more than your budget. Do you have any tips for keeping your spending nearer to £142 than £311, or are you happy to blow the budget at Christmas?
