It’s mid-September and we’re about 100 days away from Christmas.

So?

Well, Christmas is a big time for Americans, with $830 expected to be spent in 2015 on Christmas gifts, according to a Gallup article from Nov. 2015.  I haven’t seen anything about 2016, but I’ll bet it’s about the same, if not more.

Eight hundred and thirty dollars. Wow! That’s a bunch of money.  To be honest, I’ve never really kept up on what we spend on Christmas gifts, so I don’t know if we’re going to be at that amount or not. Probably.

I remember YEARS ago when we were young parents of two. We’d go into K-Mart and put stuff on law away. Paying it off until we could pick it up. Then K-Mart closed the only store near us and we didn’t have a Walmart, so we had no place to put stuff on lay away.

With that came Christmas credit card debt. We weren’t smart enough to put money away before hand, so we wracked up credit card debt. This went on for years. We’d pile up the charges, then spend the year paying them of, PLUS some.

Yeah, we weren’t real smart back then.

Some years ago we started buying Christmas gifts through out the year. Stashing them here and there. No credit card debt.

We still do that, but this year it’s going to be a bit different. How so? Well, I got a cash back card and so far, in a little over a month, I’ve earned a bit over $200. Now, $100 of that was the sign up bonus for charging so much in the first 3 months. I think it was $1000, but my wife’s car had to have a new transmission, so I charged it.

Charged it? Yep, I’ve Debitized my credit card so it’s now my debit card. Every expense has money in the account to pay for it, and Debitize pays off my montly balance every month, so Captital One is not making money on me. Nope, I’m making money off of Capital One.

I don’t plan to ever carry a balance over, so I don’t plan to have to pay any finance charges. In fact, I plan to use the cash back to pay for Christmas gift purchases. Next year my Capital One card should finance all of our Christmas buying. We’ll see. I’ll let y’all know next year.

So, what are you doing to lessen the Christmas Crunch?