Holiday Shopping Money Saving Tips

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It’s Get Up Mornings, I’m Erica Campbell and it’s Money Monday today is Cyber Monday and tomorrow is Giving Tuesday. So our money expert, Jini Thornton, is here to help us manage our finances during the holiday season. Good morning! 

GUMEC 

So today is Cyber Monday, what shopping tips, do you have for our listeners? 

JINI THORNTON 

Three quick tips for people as they are jumping into Cyber Monday today. Number one. Please know what’s on sale for real, for real. Everything that it says is on sale. That may not actually be true. #2, please use apps or browser extensions like shop savvy or PayPal honey because they can help you compare prices, find coupons and even earn cash back. Take a few minutes to do that price comparison. You really want to make sure that you’re getting a deal. And then last, please be clear on return policies before you buy today, that’s great. That’s great. The holiday season can definitely be financially stressful for a lot of people. I know a lot of people just kind of tap out during this season just to make sure they can pay rent in January.  

GUMEC 

So how do we keep people from financial trouble in the holiday season? 

JINI THORNTON 

If there are a few holiday season, dos and don’ts, please do know your budgets for the holiday season. But include every thing it’s not just the gifts, but it’s the gifts. It’s the food, it’s the travel. And don’t forget to put yourself on that list and you and you’re going to be on that list. Add yourself to that list too. That’s how we get in trouble. We don’t add the things that the purchases that we actually want to make for ourselves and we blow our budget.  

Don’t use your credit cards without a plan to pay them off. The average credit card interest rate now is 20.7%. It is crazy right now if we are going to use these credit cards and have these lingering balances, will we be really going to pay big time for that? And then our last due, please make sure the websites that you are shopping on are actually secure. So you want to look for that lock at the beginning of the website name or that HTTPS because we want to make sure those sites that we’re spending our money on are actually secure and safe and not safe. 

GUMEC 

I love it. Tomorrow is giving Tuesday and people have donated over $3.1 billion on giving Tuesday as of last. How can people determine if the charity is legit before donating with, especially with everybody having a go fund me and asking for money for all the things all the time. 

JINI THORNTON  

Listen, folks are asking for money all over the place, and unfortunately, there’s a lot of scammers fake charities out there. Here’s a couple of resources though, where you can verify if the charity is legit. The IRS has a tool and it’s called the tax-exempt search. You can literally go to the IRS’s website, irs.gov, and you can verify if a charity is indeed legit on another website. The one that I’d like to use is called charitynavigator.org. Again, you can type in the charity name to see if they’re actually legit and able to receive tax-deductible contributions. Now the charity is pressuring, be cautious because that might be a sign not to give. 

Holiday Shopping Money Saving Tips  was originally published on getuperica.com