Saving Money on Holiday Gifts

Giving holiday gifts is about more than their cost. Gift-giving makes you feel good; it lets people know that you care about them; and it provides a great opportunity to bond with people that you otherwise might not get.

Of course, to say that gift-giving is more than the costs is not to say that the costs don’t matter. In fact, the costs are quite significant. Online spending was over $1 billion on Black Friday—a day known more for its in-store sales than for its online deals—and that amount isexpected to be even higher for today’s Cyber Monday.

In other words, people are spending veritable fortunes on holiday gifts. Because it’s so easy to get carried away in the holiday spirit and spend more than you expect, it’s important to take cost-saving measures where you can. And that’s where we can help.

Here are a few tips to save money on gifts during the holiday season:

The Importance of Giving

In the spirit of Thanksgiving, I’d like to take a week off from the technical tax stuff I’ve been discussing, and instead talk about something potentially more meaningful: how to give effectively.

A lot of the material on this site talks about furthering your own finances—how to invest it wisely; how to save it for the future—but I don’t mean to suggest that hoarding is the only way, or the best way, to live life. I don’t think that there’s anything inherently wrong with having a lot of money; I think that a lot has to do with how you use your wealth. And to that extent, I think that giving away a portion of your money is a good social action.

A Guide to Paying Your First Taxes (Part Two)

In Part One, I discussed a few basic questions related to paying taxes. Here are a few more issues that young people often face:

Where can I go for tax assistance if I need help?

For people who make below $50,000, there are a few options available. One that I definitely recommend is taking advantage of free tax preparation software, which I will be discussing in the next post. You are also able to get free tax-preparation advice on top of that software, as outlined on the IRS’s website here.

A Guide to Paying Your First Taxes (Part One)

The tax-paying process often gets a bad rap in the media as complicated, difficult, and overly stressful. Those descriptions can certainly be true at times, but if you approach tax-paying with certain knowledge and the right mindset, you can handle it with relative ease.

Unfortunately, a lot information about taxes is convoluted and difficult to find. That is where this guide comes in. Although it is not a substitute for professional tax assistance—or better, the kinds of free tax preparation software that I’ll be discussing in a future post—this guide will attempt to cover the most important concepts for young people to understand to pay their taxes properly. (If you have any questions about a term discussed here, or one omitted, please add it in the comments section!)

Here is a list of common tax questions, and answers that are relevant to young people: