With the holidays just around the corner, coming up with extra cash can be a bit difficult. Some people turn to things like payday loans to get extra money, but that isn’t such a great idea when finances are tight.

So, here are five ways that you CAN make a bit of money throughout the holidays.

1) This is probably the most important, get a job. It doesn’t have to be a permanent job, there are plenty of places that are hiring just for the holidays right now. Temporary work may be the best kind that you can find right now.

2) Clear out your closet and sell that junk! You can make some extra money by selling your stuff on eBay or through a garage sale. I was recently able to raise $300 by selling some of my more useless junk on eBay. I was able to sell an old iPod that was broken for $40…you would be surprised as to what some things can sell for.

3) Work extra hours if you are able to. Not everyone has the option to work overtime anymore, but if you do time and a half is not something to turn down. I’m sure that there are lots of people who have the ability to work overtime and are taking the time.

4) Spend less than you earn. This is more of a tip as to have more money during the holiday season. This would probably be a better tip for earlier in the year if you were trying to save up for the holidays. However, if simply don’t overexert yourself financially then you would have plenty of money left over for the holidays.

5) Eating in versus eating out. Again, this is just another tip to help you save money, but it is still important to remember how much money you can save if you eat in rather than eating out.

Are you going to slow down on spending this year?

Question:

Christmas and the rest of the holiday season is just around the corner. Do you plan on spending less this year than last year?

Answer:

I am likely not going to be buying as much this year as last year. I was considering giving family members cookie tins rather than gifts they may or may not like. I also find that homemade cookies are a bit more thoughtful than a cheap gift set of bath fizzies from Target or Wal-Mart could be. I am investing my time into the cookies rather than mindlessly shopping for a “coverall” gift.

UPS has announced that it believes that it will have to deliver nearly 22 million packages on December 21st – it’s busiest day of the year this year. This represents a 40% increase over normal daily volume.

It also announced that between Thanksgiving and Christmas, it expects to deliver around 400 million packages in the United States and abroad. The increase in shipping over the holiday season also leads to more employment. UPS is expecting to hire 50,000 seasonal workers starting soon to help handle the extra holiday volume.

The media watches these expectations from UPS as well as FedEx as a measure of how well the retail sector of the economy is doing.

If you are expecting to wait until the last minute to ship something, you can ship something by air with UPS on December 23rd and it will still get there by Christmas Eve.

FedEx has said that it expects December 14th to be its busiest day of the year and that it will ship 13 million packages on that day. FedEx does, however, have a partnership with the United States Postal Service, where FedEx ships to the post office and the postal worker delivers the package to the buyer.

If you were going to ship with FedEx, if you want your package there by Christmas, you have to ship it by Dec. 17th for ground service and December 23rd for Express service.

Of course, you can also ship with the USPS. I am unsure if it has guaranteed delivery for anything other than its overnight packages however. I do know that Priority Mail is supposed to be 2-3 day delivery and I haven’t been disappointed so far in that service.

In the small town where I was relocated to my junior year of high school, there was a record store. At first it was a Sam Goody store, but then it became a FYE. Now it may likely become another hole in the wall, like the millions of other strip mall stores that have gone out of business over the past year or so.

Trans World Entertainment said that it will close 125 FYE stores by the end of the holiday season. The one area that it said it would spare is the Albany, New York area.

The company has not released a list of the stores that are scheduled to close.

I will say that if the store in the town I’m talking about closes, it is a pretty sad day for me. That was the store I purchased my first Flickerstick CD in (and while they are no where near the most famous band ever, they are still my favorite, 10 years later. This is also the store I bought my first Maroon5 CD in, before Harder to Breathe was a huge hit on the radio). If that FYE store goes out of business, there are a lot of memories that will go with the store.

565 stores will remain on the Trans World list. However, most of the stores will likely run at bare minimum like most of the stores do these days. It is hard for a record shop to compete with a store like Wal-Mart or, in bigger towns, Best Buy, Hot Topic, etc.

The only reason I think that Hot Topic is a competitor is because of the merchandise that the store carries.

I hope that Trans World can recover its losses and not have to close so many stores. It really sucks to see a lot of record stores closing. Where else can you by albums by bands that don’t exist outside top 40 radio?  A lot of independent record stores have also had to close thier doors over the past few years due to the serious decline in record sales.

Tonight I started noticing new Verizon wireless commercials featuring the “there’s a map for that” motto. The first (pictured above) is a take on Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer’s Island of Misfit Toys. There, the iPhone is sent to the island, not because it is a bad device, but because it’s power and abilities are crippled by the AT&T Network.

The second:

The Third:

As you can see they are all geared toward Christmas and the holiday season.

I find them to be quite festive and actually in good taste; they aren’t attacking the iPhone but the actual AT&T Network. Expect to see a lot of them in the coming weeks.

Raking leaves, pumpkin pie, scarves; all of these remind me of Fall. One other thing that reminds me of Fall is the consumer driven Black Friday holiday. Wal-Mart is actually one of my favorite places to go on Black Friday, not because I want a big ticket item, but because it is so fun to people-watch at Wal-Mart (the store I shop at is in a small town).

This year, Wal-Mart wants to completely corner the retail market; on everything form big screen televisions to turkey.

Turkeys are going on sale across the country at Wal-Mart for 40 cents per pound beginning November 4th. According to a survey by the American Farm Bureau Federation, that is 1/3 of last year’s turkey price. Along with turkey, Wal-Mart will be reducing prices on canned vegetables, cranberry sauce, stuffing, and red potatoes. You may also be able to find deals on rolls and pumpkin cake. The goal is to have a $20 meal that can serve eight people.

Another thing that the retailer is doing is having smaller sales during some weekends until Christmas where you can get big discounts on big ticket items. This weekend, you can buy a HP laptop for $300 and a 42″ Sharp LCD TV for $500. While the laptop is not exactly the best on the market, you can get a 15.6″ laptop for the same price that many people are paying for netbooks, and I promise that the HP will out perform any of the netbooks that Wal-Mart has.

Wal-Mart, although it is a huge company, has had its stock slip 11% this year. Even after it announced the price drops earlier, the stock still slid a bit. What really matters is after the holiday season when all the retailers will tally up how they did.

There aren’t too many Black Friday ads out as of today, not a lot that have leaked anyway. The rumors are going around, however, that this year will have decent sales to get people to come in and spend money. The retail stores really need for people to spend a lot of money this year (even though this will likely be another bad Christmas season).

The Consumer Board released October’s Consumer Confidence Index number today and it was below what anyone was expecting. It fell to 47.7 for the month which is the Board’s second lowest reading since May.

to put the number into perspective; a number higher than 90 means that the economy is doing well and anything above 100 says that there is strong growth in the economy. The lowest that the Consumer Board has ever measured was the record low of 25.3 in February 2009. It only took a few months to climb back up to 53.4 last month.

The reason that consumer confidence is so important is because it is the number that tells how much consumers are spending on items. Because spending on these items accounts for 70% of the United States economy (according to the government), it is an important economic indicator.

So, what does a drop in the consumer confidence index number mean? It shows that consumers have a grim outlook of the future.

According to Lynn Franco, the director of the Conference Board’s Consumer Research Center, “Consumers also remain quite pessimistic about their future earnings, a sentiment that will likely constrain spending during the holidays.”

This news is not welcomed by the retailers in the country. Last year, spending around the holidays fell to levels not seen since the 1960′s. With so many retailers across the United States still hurting and struggling and also going out of business, many of them are counting on this holiday season to prop them up and maybe put them in the black for the year.

The Consumer Board gets the Consumer Confidence Index by sending surveys to 5,000 homes across the country. For October’s numbers, the cutoff date was October 21st.

I honestly think all the figures and indexes like this put people into worry-mode. When people are truly worried about their jobs and their finances they don’t spend. For the past couple of months, people have been worried about their income even with plenty of job security. Jobs aren’t being lost at the rate that they were and there are plenty of places where people are working and not having to worry whether or not their job will be there the next day.

The Consumer Confidence Index was something that we didn’t have before the 60′s and it seems as though the country’s consumer spending was not that bad through the 50′s (after WWII anyway).

What do you think about the Consumer Confidence Index and any of the other financial indexes that come out telling you how the economy is doing? Are there any of these indicators that you follow to tell you how things are going?

I believe I would follow the unemployment numbers a bit more closely than this one.

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It has to be that time of year again, when everyone is out looking for gifts for their friends and family. It always seems that the go-to gift for some is a gift card or a some kind of bath set (here’s a note to guys out there who think the bath sets are good ideas: They’re really not; chances are whoever you’re buying the bath set for already has 20 of them).

Because of the season, GameStop is looking to hire 15,000 seasonal workers. The jobs are all part time and only pay minimum wage, but the little bit of money that the store is paying is better than what some people are receiving right now: nothing.

GameStop does something like this every year. It hires this many seasonal workers starting in the fall and their time is over on December 24.

The biggest increase will be the “game advisers” which are the people in the store who are meant to help shoppers pick out video games. There will be 78% more of these than there are currently. Honestly, I have never seen a game adviser in my local GameStop. The most advice I have ever gotten on a game is “That game is really cool.”

You can really tell how much business the company expects over the holiday season because the 15,000 seasonal workers means that the employee base for the company increases by nearly 50%.

This also goes along with most retail stores’ holiday plans. After all, most of the business that retail stores do is done over the holiday season.

Wal-Mart has had success around Christmastime. In the past it has offered toys by price point such as $10 toys and $15 toys. This year it is going to be upping its offering of $10 toys to more than 100 toys, including 10 of its most popular toys.

So, what can $10 at Wal-Mart get your child? There are Barbie dolls, board games, Transformers action figures, and even Play-Doh kits (I loved those when I was a kid). When you’re paying $10 for Monopoly, you are definitely getting a deal because any other time throughout the year, Monopoly costs $15-$20.

The discounts on toys will last through the holiday season.

Laura Phillips, the vice president of toys (side note: how fun would that job be?) for Wal-Mart said that when mothers were surveyed, their top priority for shopping this holiday season is finding toys that fit into their budgets. She went on to say, “What we learned from last holiday was that price mattered more than ever.”

This could be why the majority of toys on the Toys R Us list that came out are all under $20.

The holiday season is when retailers make up for poor sales through out the year. On average, holiday sales make up 25 to 40% of the annual revenue for a retailer. Last year was the worst holiday shopping season in almost 40 years according to some analysts.

Phillips said that somewhere in the neighborhood of 70% of shoppers of Wal-Mart begin their holiday shopping sometime before Halloween and that 20% actually finish their shopping by Halloween.

If you haven’t been out in a couple of weeks, it really looks like some retailers are trying to take advantage of that. I have seen more Christmas decorations out earlier than last year. Even at a local Walgreen’s, they had pulled out the Christmas wrapping paper from last year that still had the 50% off signs on them. I can guarantee that those signs will come off and the paper will be put out as soon as they can clear space for it in the middle of the store.

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