A post-Christmas spending survey confirms what most of us already know by looking at our credit card balances: we overspent on Christmas gifts.

The US Consumer Reports survey found that consumers planned to spend an average $699 on Christmas gifts but this was blown out to $811, with about one in five spending over $1,000 on gifts.

Almost half (47%) of the consumers were very naughty, using their credit cards to buy some or all of their gifts. And since credit cards feel like magic money(!), they spent more, too, with an average Christmas gift expenditure of $896. Those who lived in households earning over $100K spent a whopping $1,570 on their credit cards.

While 40% plan to settle their Christmas gift credit card debt by the end of January, one in five won’t pay it off until March with 9% expecting to pay it off in full by June.

As you can probably guess, I didn’t spend $1,000 on gifts – probably closer to about $350 - but then I like buying Christmas and birthday gifts all year long as it’s fun AND it lessens the expense in December.

If you plan to spend $1,000 on Christmas (and/or birthday) gifts this year, remember that you need to put away about $83.33 a month every month until December (or buy gifts to that value every month when you see something great on sale).

Tags: bargain-hunting, birthday gifts, Christmas gifts

This entry was posted on Friday, January 29th, 2010 at 12:06 am and is filed under Christmas gifts, birthday gifts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.