20 Tips to Help Stay Within Your Holiday Budget

We admit it: much advice about holiday shopping is rather simplistic and preachy. Like diet and exercise, holiday shopping is something we all feel comfortable bleating about - even if we aren’t following best practices ourselves. But with so much money at stake, it never hurts to refresh on the fundamentals of intelligent, budgeted holiday shopping. Keep these 20 tips in mind and you’ll escape the holidays without a heart attack-inducing credit card bill in January.

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10 Simple Tips to Master the Art of Haggling and Savvy Shopping

If you’re a news junkie like me, you may have read about a recent finding produced by America’s Research Group, which found that in the past holiday season, approximately 72% of customers haggled with a retailer, compared with 56% the year before.  Upon hearing this news, the consumer advocate in me was delighted and I proceeded to do a little dance in the head — or so I thought until fellow passengers on the bus started starring at me funny.

Public dancing aside, it was even more enjoyable to read that about 80% of those attempting to haggle were successful at getting a better deal, compared with about half of those who were successful a year earlier.  Despite difficult economic times, it was refreshing for us at BillShrink to see that more Americans are getting over the idea that the act of haggling  can be bad-form — after all, when done properly and gracefully, haggling is just another way for a savvy consumer to get a better deal.

If haggling isn’t your forte, have no fear, we have a few tips for you.

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Minimize Your Risk and Save Money at Retail Stores

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