Holiday Shopping season is here. Retailers were eager for Halloween to be over to roll out everything holiday related. You may have read in the news that Amazon and Walmart are engaged in price wars with Target following close behind.

What does this mean to you? This means that this holiday shopping season it will be a buyers’ market. The deals are already aplenty, with Walmart even rolling out one-day sales this year. I only suspect that as Black Friday comes and goes these wars will get even fiercer.

While it is already a buyers market and deals are and will be plentiful, how do you keep yourself from getting carried away? I think we can all admit that it is easy to get carried away when bargain shopping. So how do you stop yourself from being an statistic: one in 13 million Americans still paying credit card bills from last year’s holiday shopping?

1. Create a budget of how much you can spend on this year’s holiday shopping. It is important to determine how much you can afford to spend, so you stick to this amount.
2. Make a list and stick to it. This is very important. Without a list you face the risk of overbuying for some and not buying for others. Ultimately this results in you overspending.
3. Don’t jump on a deal because it is “such a great deal.” In other words, control yourself. Even if a deal is such a “great deal” if you don’t need the item what you have just done is waste your hard earned money.

I am just like you, I love the Holidays and I love shopping for others. While this is usually a blog for saving money on everyday items I understand that right now you are probably looking for gifts for others. I want to help you get a good deal on those too. Just like last year I am going to keep an eye out for really good deals on gifts. It would be helpful for me if you gave me an idea of what kind of things you are looking for (so, leave me a comment). I know most likely you are looking for toys, so I will start highlighting some good toy deals at brick and mortar stores as well as online. I just wanted to let you know this, so you know that I am adding these type of deals for the Holiday season and it is not because this blog has changed focus permanently.

This past week I read an article in the Wall Street Journal that discussed the comeback of layaway. I was even more interested about this topic after I watched commercials advertising the Layaway Program at Kmart. So I decided to start reading about it more to try to figure out who could benefit under this payment plan. Initially I thought there could be something positive about layaway and even came up with three arguments to make my case for it. That was until I started looking into the first argument.

At first, I thought that the cost of putting items on layaway was cheap. I found online the terms and conditions for Kmart’s layaway program. Their $5 Service Fee seems reasonable and cheap enough. But then I pulled out my calculator to determine the effective interest rate this fee posed. For example if you put on layaway a $100 value item, you are effectively paying 5% in interest to do that. Since the layaway period is 8 weeks, that 5% turns into a 32.5% APR you are paying on this purchase. That’s almost a loan shark.

In absolute terms $5 doesn’t seem like very much does it? But look how much it is. Skip layaway and start your own “Saveaway” program. Go ahead, hit the stores with your holiday shopping list and make a total of how much everything you would like to get will cost. Then divide that total by the number of weeks that are still left until the holidays. Put that money aside every week. You can either accumulate it in an envelope or head to the store and buy a gift card if you think you may be tempted to spend the money. When the holidays are almost here pull out your cash or gift cards and go shopping without any second thoughts of the interest charges you could have been paying.

Don’t be fooled by these “easy payment” programs. Once you get through the fine print you can be surprised by how much worse than even using a credit card they are.