Is Your Holiday Financial Stress Meter Pegged?

Are you in Holiday Financial Denial?  Are you looking at a pile of receipts that is stressing you out knowing tomorrow is Christmas?  Don't forget the after Christmas sales.

The odd thing is I didn’t even go over my gift budget this year.  If I didn’t spend all of the money I planned to spend on gifts why would I be stressed about money.  The simple answer is “annual bills”.

This time of year, many major organizations send out invoices.  As an investor I have a Real Estate License.  Every week for the last three weeks, I have been sent a gentle reminder that I owe my board dues, local association dues and oh by the way, they would like another $80 for the political action fund.  

Note to the National Association of Realtors.  You might save a ton of money on the reminders if you didn’t have January 1st as your due date and made it more sensible like June 1st. Why?  Well April everyone is worried about Taxes, that is out, May they are booking vacations, that is out, October, the holiday plans start, November and December the holiday spending begins.

The Realtor associations aren’t the only ones.  Every group I belong to wants money on January 1st.  It feels like the day after Christmas I have to clean out my accounts and send checks to everyone at once.  In fact, I am going to write more checks this week then I wrote the rest of the year because I won’t let any of these groups “auto bill”.  

The one that got it right was the Vail Corp.  In order to get the best guaranteed price on Ski Passes, I am on auto renewal with them.  They took the deposit in June, good, and then charged me for the rest in late October, pretty good. By the time the slopes opened, my annual pass was paid for and I wasn’t having to stand in a long line to pay nearly twice as much for my new pass.

I think at our board meeting we are going to try and figure out how to change our customers plans so that January 1st, there isn’t an invoice, Maybe even May 1st to let them recover from their tax bill.  

What do you think.  Would you rather get billed 10% more each month and not have an invoice in December that is due January 1st?