With the holidays approaching and even the basics of the budget, such as food and gas costing more and more, it is really important to save where ever you can. I’ll be posting a series of articles about saving money during the holidays.
Let’s start with something that generally comes early in the season, and that is Christmas or holiday greeting cards. Now this might not seem like a huge expense, but you have to factor in the cost of the cards themselves, as well as the postage.
Here are some tips that will allow you to save some money when you send your cards.
1. If you didn’t stock up at the end of the last holiday season when the cards were marked way down, then you’ll have to find a way to purchase them this year. Wait at least until December when card prices will drop drastically, and buy one get one free deals will start appearing.
2. Consider reusing your old cards. You can turn them into new ones by cutting off the front and gluing that front to new card stock. Or turn them into postcards.
3. And speaking of postcards, they are much less expensive to send than are the regular cards. You can purchase Christmas and holiday postcards at specialty shops or the post office. And of course, you can make your own.
4. Making your own Christmas cards can be a fun and frugal activity for the whole family. The pitfall, of course, is in spending more on the card making supplies than you would have on a couple of boxes of cards. There are plenty of online resources and patterns for cards, or just buy a couple of inexpensive stamps and a stamp pad.
5. Consider the alternatives, such as sending e-cards or making a phone call. We can call anywhere we want for the same monthly fee, so making phone calls is actually less expensive for us to do, and it is a nice way to catch up.
Mary Ann Romans writes about everything related to saving money in the Frugal Blog, technology in the Computing Blog, and creating a home in the Home Blog. You can read more of her articles by clicking here.
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