raise your hand if you like saving money hey everyone it's just to come welcome to the mommy archives it's that time of year where we're all doing our Christmas shopping and we can spend a lot of money if we're not careful and I'm sure most of us want to save where we can so today I'm going to share my top tips for saving money on your Christmas shopping my first tip is to shop online I find some of the most competitive prices online but besides that it's just a good way to avoid getting in the hustle and bustle the stores and seeing all of the things and being urged to make those impulse purchases because we know when you go to store your mom barded with so many things you're like oh I didn't think that oh I didn't think of that and you may well already have a list but it's so easy to give in to those things when that's all that you're seeing in front of you it's like stuff is everywhere so buy online shopping it can help keep that focus a lot more easily then you also don't have to go from store to store trying to get the best deal you can find everything from the comfort of your home online you're not spending money on gas going around and as a bonus you're not getting caught up in the crazy shopping madness that goes on this time of year along with shopping online there are some very important tips I wanted to share I recently learned about Ernie and it is like life-changing code it comes to online shopping because who like me tries to wait around tries to find the best price sometimes you don't know something's going to go on an even deeper sale and you just kind of struggle to know if you're getting a fair price well Ernie kind of eliminates that fear for you because you make a purchase and then it tracks it for you and then if it goes cheaper and will either get a discount for you back from the retailer or from your credit card under credit card protections these are the types of things you would kind of have to jump through hoops to do on your own but by linking your email address to ernie so it can track your online receipts you can link your Amazon account you can link your credit cards already we'll keep track of all of those things for you and take care of all the hard work for you it's free to download us an app or use in your browser and then they just take a twenty five percent commission back essentially on the rebates that they got for you but again it eliminates so much work for you so I think it's totally worth it it takes very little effort on your part to link all of these things and I've already seen like the minute I downloaded the journey app I saw like that things I had purchased on Amazon had already dropped in price significantly and so that is definitely a great way to save on money and you don't have to worry about keeping track of things or going back to the store and asking for refunds it takes care of it for you the next thing I want to talk about in regards to online shopping is using Ebates Ebates is a cashback website that gets you money back on the purchases that you make and so this website isn't necessarily going to give you immediate savings but it is going to put money back into your pocket after you've made purchases so they have a website you can access different stores through you can also use their app and they even have a browser plug-in that you just click the button to activate it when you are shopping online it'll automatically get you your savings back and so it can get you one percent savings at some stores you know a little lower but I also shopped at stores and gotten like 10 to 15% back in savings during Cyber Monday and Black Friday they tend to up their percentages and so you get even more cash back so that's a great time to do your online shopping through Ebates and if you are new to signing up I'll leave my referral link down below because you can get a $10 gift card for free after you've made your initial purchase and so that is awesome because who doesn't want a $10 gift card it's another really easy thing to use takes very little effort on your part and you get money back into your pocket now of course any time your online shopping you always want to try to use a coupon code but those can be a little difficult to search for time sometimes the website has an advertise sometimes they don't sometimes you're doing a Google search sometimes you're looking at RetailMeNot which I do use all the time but my friend marina bits and Clips recently introduced me to honey that's another browser plugin and it will automatically show you the coupon codes that you can be using at different stores so instead of you have to go through the effort to do all the searching to find the best deals it'll find them for you it also has this neat feature where it will show you the fluctuation in prices on Amazon because on Amazon prices do tend to go up and down quite a bit so it can show you if the price that it's advertised for right now is a good deal or not if you know there's a gift you want to purchase from a certain store my tip there is to make sure to sign up for that stores email list I know a lot of stores this time of year will run like one day only sales on certain items or have one day only coupons for like a section like home or toys or whatever I recently saw Target do this where for one day only they had 25% off the entire toy selection which if you weren't signed up to their email list you probably wouldn't have known about so you can do that online you can also download the apps for different stores and get notifications sent to you but if you know you're going to be shopping for something specific at your favorite store make sure that you're signing up to those things I don't like to be signed up to those types of things year-round but even if you just do it for this time of year so you're getting the alerts for the coupons that you need or the deals that you really need you can get them now and then you can just unsubscribe later so it's not filling up your mailbox later whether you're shopping online or if you prefer to shop in-store two things that you absolutely need for your Christmas shopping are a budget and a plan without those two things it's going to be utter chaos you are probably going to spend way much more money than you need to you may buy more gifts than you need to and so sit down make sure you have a goal for the budget you would like to stay at or under go through and write down everybody that you want to purchase things for and figure out how can I break this budget up to fit my needs of all of these people because sometimes you may have a gift in mind for someone and then you really take a look at you budget and you realize who that may be stretching myself a little bit too much and Christmas is wonderful you guys I love this time of year I love gift-giving I love the spirit of the season but Christmas is not worth going into debt over Point Blank you need to make sure that you know exactly how many pennies you have to spend because really guys who wants to end the Christmas season with all this joy and all this fun and then have credit card bills they have to pay off that accumulate interest and interest upon interest and then all these great deals that you got were useless anyway because you're spending a ton of money on interest on them don't operate that way guys make sure you have a budget and a plan and stick to it there's so many different ways to save on your Christmas shopping and so I would love to hear from you guys if I didn't mention something that you think is really important leave it in the comments down below I've also made some videos in the past that you may find helpful so I will link them in the cards throughout this video as well as down below in the description box you can do DIY gifts and I did do a DIY mason jar gift ideas video last year with some cute and easy ideas you can do family gifts instead of individual gifts which I also did a video about last year and so there are so many different ways you can save money this time of year so I really do want to hear from you guys and if you enjoyed this video if these tips were helpful to you please be sure to give it a thumbs up also if you're new I would love to have you stick around and hit that subscribe button I post new videos every Sunday Tuesday and Thursday on the topics a motherhood home and lifestyle and I would love to have you stick around and get to know you introduce yourself in the comments below I hope you guys are having a great kickoff to your holiday season Merry Christmas and I'll see you in the next video bye