Christmas MoneySaving '11 Act now to slash festive costs

Earn 5% cashback

The Capital One* World Mastercard pays a huge 5% on all spending (£5 per £100) on up to £2,000 spent in the first three months. Apply soon and it should cover Christmas and the January sales. To get it, you need to earn over £20,000, be 21+ and a homeowner. The key to this is ...

Use it for all normal spending to earn, but ensure you always set up a direct debit to repay IN FULL every month, otherwise you'll pay HUGE interest (19.9% rep APR).

Full info: Cashback Cards and Credit Card Freebies

Let your finances rule

Too many work through a wanna-have list – massive tree, gifts galore, plasma telly, gourmet food – and only then ask “how will we pay for it?”

Instead ask "what can I afford to spend on Christmas?" and work out how to have the best possible time within that budget. Christmas is one day – don't ruin the whole of the new year for it.

Stop spending on things you don't need

Our DemoHOHOtivator tool reveals how much you really spend on coffees, snacks, cigs, mags and other discretionary purchases and shows how much you can save in time for Christmas by ditching 'em.

It's updated daily, so whenever you choose to cut back, it gives the exact savings. There's also a specially designed printed version to stick on the wall or fridge. For example, walk instead of taking the £1 bus every day, and you could save £100 before Christmas.

Demotivate yourself! The DemHOHOtivator

Be ready to pounce from now

Set aside a special space for all Christmas goodies. Make a list of who you need to buy for and whenever you see goods at kick-bum prices, grab, wrap ‘n’ stuff them in your cupboard.

Deals are listed in Hot Bargains, Discount Vouchers and High Street Sales. Also sign up to MoneySavingExpert's free weekly email, for guides, vouchers & deals.

Generate extra Xmas cash

If you can't get overtime or more work, there're still scores of legal and legit ways to add to your income. You could sell your old mobile, get paid for opinions, become a comper, rent out your parking space and much more.

Full guide to over 50 ways to: Boost Your Income

Spread the cost at no cost

The best time to start saving for Christmas is Boxing Day. After all, the average family spends £600 – spread over the year that's just £50 a month. Yet too many pay for Christmas with December's income and fill the gap with debt.

It's still possible to spread the cost. Work out your rough Christmas spending, eg, £600, and make it up by putting aside £200 in October, November and December, to spread the cost out over three months.

If you need to (try not to though), it's also possible to spread the cost of Christmas into January, without any interest cost, even if you don't have a special 0% credit card. This is because if you pay almost any card off in full there's no interest.

Sign a No Unnecessary Present Pact

While gift giving for kids or in the immediate family is great, if you're going to spread it wider, consider its effect. Giving creates an obligation to give in return. Worse still, it can misprioritise our finances.

If Janet gives skint John £20 socks, and he feels obliged to return a £20 scarf, in effect John's spent £20 on the socks. Is that really what he'd have spent the cash on? See Martin's full Ban Christmas Presents blog.

Make sure you're buying things they will need or want, and consider a pact to either not give or limit the cost. To help, we built a No Unnecessary Present Pact (NUPP) tool. Send a pre-Xmas “NUPP” email to take the stigma out of NOT giving just for the sake of it. Alternatively, just agree to limit gifts to £5 or £10 and some thought.

Use the tool: Free NUPP email

Swap tips on the special occasions board

To help with the Crimbo preparation, the Special Occasions board is full of top tips to cut the festive season's cost. MoneySavers post bargain pressies and decorations, and share their suggestions on having a more affordable Christmas.

If you need to borrow, use a 0% credit card

Borrowing for Christmas is always a bad idea. Yet some people still do it. If that's you, at least be sensible with your borrowing. Use the longest 0% spending credit card possible – new Tesco* cardholders get 0% for 15 months, and M&S* Credit Card also offers this for 15 months. After the 0% rate ends, it's 16.9% and 15.9% representative APR respectively.

Always plan to repay in full way before next Christmas. And if you can't get it, frankly, cancel Christmas spending. Just enjoy a family meal, raise a glass and focus on a financially good new year.

Full guide: 0% credit cards

Reclaim lost Tesco points, then treble their value

Quickly check and reclaim lost vouchers online – see Reclaim Tesco Vouchers for a full how-to. Many have found over £100.

Yet don't save them for festive food. Check its Rewards brochure to triple vouchers' value (£10 becomes £30) on pressies such as jewellery, Merlin passes and more. This is based on list price, so do check goods’ real cost.

Full how to: Reclaim Tesco Vouchers, Boost Nectar, Airmiles or Tesco Points

4% boost to Christmas budgets

Supermarket saving-stamps schemes encourage year-long saving for Christmas, yet a loophole allows you to get the YEAR's bonus in ONE day.

Most pay it depending on how much you've saved by a specific day, eg, Asda's was 21 Nov last year, so dunk the cash in the day before and it'll add 4% on top, but the cash must be spent at its stores.

Full guide: Xmas Spending Boost (To be updated for Xmas 2011 shortly)

Use discount vouchers, don't pay full price

Shops are clever: in the run up to Christmas they want to entice new customers with discounts, without reducing the price for people who'll shop there anyway. Whether shopping online or on the high street, there are loads of hidden vouchers and discount codes to get money off.

To help, we collate the best in daily updated Deals Lists: Discount Vouchers, Grocery Coupons, Days Out, Restaurants

Use shopbots for cheapest books, CDs and electricals

Why go to direct to Amazon to buy a book when in the same amount of clicks, a ‘shopping robot' will search scores of internet retailers to find which is selling it cheapest?

Just tell it what's required, click on 'compare prices' and it finds the cheapest for you, whether it's books, games, CDs, DVDs, electrical goods or practically anything else.

To help, we built the Megashopbot, which whizzes around all the top online retailers to find you the cheapest price.

And remember … shop online and Christmas shopping ends earlier. The typical ‘last order date' for online shops is 18 December, though it varies.

Full how to: Cheap Online Shopping

Get cashback on your shopping

Visit online stores via cashback websites, like like Topcashback* or Quidco* to get a kickback on top (see this as a bonus, as it's never 100% guaranteed).

Even better, we built the Cashback Maximiser, which visits them all and reveals which site pays the most for whichever retailer you chose.

Full how to: Top Cashback Sites

Be creative, not costly

There are many ways to give great gifts without spending a fortune. With a drop of imagination and spark of creativity, you can find great gifts costing just £5.

It could be giving your partner a back-rub or promising to do the dishes (though of course, you'll have to go through with it!) Or write your other half a letter telling them why you love them.

It's always said that young children prefer the wrapping not the gift, so buy the biggest box you can, fill it with balloons and wrap the whole thing in Christmas paper.

They'll love the huge box and jumping in the balloons. Though do supervise, as balloons can choke younger children.

Our Festive Fivers competition challenged MoneySavers to dream up a present for either a child or adult for less than a fiver, and it can be bought, made or a mix of the two.

Full how to: Festive Fivers

Grab store card discounts, but don't pay interest

Never, ever, ever borrow on store cards! In other words, if you spend on them, you must pay them off in full at the end of the month, or you'll be charged hideous interest rates. Yet most store cards tempt you in with discounts such as 10% off your first spend, which can be turned to your advantage.

Grab one especially for Christmas, then pay off in full, and you gain while the store card company doesn't.

Full how to: Store Cards, 0% Credit Cards

Amazon hidden gift discounts of 50% and more

Amazon often offers 90% and better reductions, yet it directs people to other areas, sending them to higher profit margin products instead.

But there's a geeky way to manipulate Amazon's web links to display all heavily-reduced bargains. The MSE Amazon Hidden Discount Finder tool swiftly builds super-specific pages of Amazons hidden 75%+ OFF deals, eg, 60%+ off TVs*, 90%+ off kids' DVDs* and 90%+ off toys*.

Fancy perfume on the cheap

Forget big department stores for perfume: a whole bunch of specialist online sellers offer it for a fraction of the price. Better still, buy the even cheaper unboxed bottles, then get a pretty box and wrapping for a couple of quid. This way, they think you went to extra effort but actually you saved extra cash.

Also see the great Great 'smell-a-like perfumes' Hunt, where MoneySavers have sniffed out some dirt-cheap dead ringers for posh perfumes, ie, Next's Just Pink smells like Ralph Lauren Romance, M&S True Red like Hugo Boss Deep Red.

Full how to: Cheapest Perfume

Use Martin's Money Mantras before you spend

Whatever you plan to buy, whether it's a present or it's for yourself, it's worth questioning your spending with one of two money mantras, depending on whether you're skint or not. Before you buy anything, ask yourself these three questions:

Knock £100s off your Christmas food shop

If you're planning a massive shop, go to Mysupermarket and it'll compare the cost of goods in Tesco, Sainsbury's, Ocado (Waitrose) and Asda online. Yet these prices are similar even if you go yourself.

Plus don't feel you need to get higher brands for Christmas. For one ITV programme, Martin organised two identical Christmas parties for 20 nurses.

For one, the tree, drinks and food were a higher level brand. The other, one brand level lower, ie, if the higher brand was ‘finest' the lower was ‘normal', and if the higher brand was ‘normal' the lower was own brand. They didn't know which was which, and preferred the cheaper stuff more often than the expensive.

Full how to: Supermarket Shopping

Sell old gold for a last minute cash hit

The TV's awash with 'sell your gold' ads. While nightmare stories about this fledgling industry abound, we found a few good-uns.

Send your gold to the right gold buying site and the cash can be in your account in two days – a great way to top up your pressie fund.

The best buyers typically pay £85 for an 18ct gold ring and £17 for gold stud earrings, eg, one MoneySaver who posted 32g of broken earrings and chains got £270. Yet beware – many have great headline prices, but send shiny stuff in and they say it's worth a fraction of this.

Full how to: Gold Selling

Free reply or video message from Santa

There are companies out there that charge a tenner a time to reply to children's letters to Santa. Yet there's an easy way to do it for free, if you act by 14 December 2011.

Plus there's also a nifty website that, with a few personal details, will create a personalised video message from Santa.

Full how to: Free Santa Letter and Video

Chat to family and friends for free via the web

If you and the person you want to talk to overseas both have the internet, you can talk for free via internet telephony. Simply download software such as Skype* for free onto your computer (you both need to have the software) and plug in a headset and mic to natter for free.

Alternatively, chat on a normal phone for as little as 1p/minute by using special ‘override' providers such as 18185. Here, you tap in an access code to dial for its service and this is billed on your normal home phone bill at a fixed rate. You then dial the number you're calling at no further charge.

Full how to: Completely Free Calls Worldwide

Secret Santa

Why not follow the old tradition of Secret Santa. This is where a group of work colleagues, friends, or even a school class set a budget, eg, £5 or £10 per present, and secretly draw names out of a hat for who needs to buy for whom. This way you need only buy one present for the group, rather than scores.

Sort Xmas post early

If you're posting Christmas presents, make sure you don't miss the last post. The 2011 last first-class post is 20 December, or 17 December for second-class.

For international airmail, post by 5 December to South and Central America, Caribbean, Africa, Middle East, Far East (except Japan), Asia, New Zealand and Australia.

For Japan, USA, Canada and Eastern Europe, post by 9 December, while Western Europe is 12 December.

Boring, but make a list, and check it twice!

Christmas shopping on impulse is dangerous, so make an old-fashioned shopping list and stick to it. Remember, shops spend a fortune on targeting your spending impulses – a list helps you beat them. Even if you're shopping on the high street, remember to benchmark the prices using shopbots first.

Bah humbug! Delay Christmas

Well, delay it for a few presents at least. Don't feel forced into giving huge presents in time for Christmas. If the gift is likely to be one that'll be reduced in the sales, eg, a new flat screen TV, computer or dress, why not simply send an IOU note with a promise to buy by mid-January.

Put it in a nice card, tie a ribbon round it and make it look special. But, remember, by spending less for Christmas you'll have more money in the family kitty.

Don't neglect next Christmas either!

Buy cards and decorations in December and prices are sky high. Yet, come January, the price plummets and you can pick up massive reductions on festive treats.

In many ways, even now it's too late to get the very best MoneySaving Christmas. The perfect time is January. As well as buying cheaply at the sales for next year, you can start a savings fund, putting cash aside each month and earning interest on it.

Then come December, you'll know exactly what money you've spent and can have Christmas without the worry of debts.