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The real costs of gift-giving: Financial stress – part 2

Our Guide to Last minute Christmas shopping guide

The real costs of gift-giving: Financial stress – part 2.

Who wants to buy something special for their partner, relative, friend or colleague on Black Friday or this Christmas? It’s a thoughtful idea given how tough 2020 has been – with bushfires, then the COVID-19 pandemic, various lockdowns and financial stress coming at Australians in waves all year.

If we are not aware of our underlying financial stress at this time of year, advertising pressure can trick us into an expensive false reality: that our usual safe spending limits don’t apply when it comes to proving our care for others.

It’s sad to think we actually believe that the price of gifts should be in proportion to what people mean to us – and yet our national gift-giving habits suggests we overlook the damaging realities of money stress at the checkout.

Megan McArdle of Bloomberg, argued “there is a higher logic to the gift economy … that mandates we keep giving and receiving objects of dubious value”.

Gift-giving, she wrote, was connected to “an innate human value called “reciprocal altruism” which makes the costs of gifts “a maintenance fee for your relationship”.

There are of course, real problems beyond warm and fuzzy feelings when altruism is all about money.

As well-intentioned as gift-giving is, the Christmas rush to buy gifts is sometimes only ‘generous’ financially; how often is our gift something the recipient really needs and will use?

Often, we believe we are too busy to understand our recipients real wants and needs. When we go into this kind of autopilot thinking, we can’t see that we are setting ourselves up for financial stress and its many impacts on our relationships, our work, and potentially making any existing anxiety and depression worse.

Research by Joseph Goodman (from Washington State University) and Sarah Lim (from Seoul’s Center for Happiness Studies) found people commonly buy material gifts over experiential gifts, despite the fact that recipients often feel happier receiving experiences.

Material gifts are those we can touch while experiential gifts are those that create a memory.

So, gift-giving becomes a stressful problem which we solve with money – by buying the latest expensive gadget, a heavily-marketed ‘luxury’ or some kind of timeless status symbol.

If it sounds mean-spirited to question gift-giving, that’s not the intention here. Only narcissists and debt collectors (and the occasional teenager) believe it’s better to receive than to give.

The problems raised here are not about gift-giving per se, it’s the headless chook race that it can resemble – and the financial stress and strain placed on many of us.

Last Christmas Australians splurged a mammoth A$28 billion on credit cards, according to finder.com.au – over $1,100 for every many woman and child.

Add the costs of Valentine’s Day, Easter, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, birthdays, weddings and anniversaries and you can see how gift-buying has become a major driver of the retail engine in Western economies.

Of course, it’s a double-edged sword: retail spending is celebrated each year as a measurement of the strength of the economy. But at a personal level, buying gifts for everyone, and without mindful budgetary limits, will likely cause financial stress.

Debt consistently shows up in surveys as a leading cause of financial stress. But it’s now widely known personal money problems consistently show up in research as a major cause – if not the major cause – of stress in general.

The links between financial stress and poor mental health are well known, but recently the physical symptoms are being acknowledged and links to serious physical illness are emerging.

In the United States, the company Four Seasons Financial Education surveyed 511 employees in a national study and found disturbing correlations between financial stress and health problems. The respondents rated their level of financial stress, then the prevalence of health issues between two groups was compared.

People with high financial stress had higher reported incidence of health issues across all nine illnesses identified – heart attack, high blood pressure, depression, anxiety, infertility, gastrointestinal issues and sleeplessness, migraines/headaches and memory loss.

“The greatest disparities were found with anxiety and depression between these two groups,” the study findings said. In the groups with lower financial stress, 19 per cent reported depression and anxiety, but amongst the more financially stressed respondents, 55 per cent were depressed and 68 per cent had anxiety.

When the survey responses were further broken down, into the very highest and lowest levels of financial stress, people under extreme financial stress were five times more likely to have memory loss issues, more three times as likely to report depression and nearly twice as likely to have anxiety.

They were also twice as likely to have gastrointestinal problems.

Debt is a major cause of financial stress and the search for an answer has become a popular google search term in its own right, with variations of ‘how do I relieve my financial stress?’ common.

If you’ve tried all the usual advice and methods, it might be time to investigate a new approach, or at least, new tools to supplement what you are already doing.

In the final part of our series on the real cost of gift-giving, we look at how mindfulness can help reign in over-spending and the financial stress that often comes from increasing your debt burden at this time of year.

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The real cost of gift-giving: Financial stress – part 1

Last minute Christmas shopping guide

The real cost of gift-giving: Financial stress – part 1.

The tinsel and decorations are still under the stairs, but now is the time to think ahead so that you don’t join millions of Australians saddled repaying holiday debt well into 2021.

One of the leading pressures on many people’s already-strained financial position is the habit of over-spending on gifts; gifts that don’t necessarily prove our love for others.

In this three-part series we will explore the size of our national gift-buying problem, look at the health impacts of the financial stress that follows and then explore how a targeted mindfulness practice can help change the auto-pilot approach to gift-giving while potentially bringing us even closer to loved ones.

There is also a real likelihood that gift-giving becomes retail therapy in these stressful COVID times – a set of behaviours we use to try and feel a bit better. But as Financial Mindfulness has found, overspending has the opposite effect on our financial stress levels.

Overall, Australian households spent an average of A$969 on Christmas gifts in 2019 (the total spend on gifts was expected to be $18.8 billion) according to finder.com.au. Last December alone, A$28 billion was spent on cards, with millions more put on Buy Now Pay Later accounts too, which a third of us now have.

Nearly half a million of us will take up to six months to pay off holiday debts, while more than half of us still manage a spending binge for on Valentine’s Day (with Buy Now Pay Later schemes increasingly funding this). All this while also juggling mortgage, student loan and/or car repayments.

The national home loan bill this year topped A$2 trillion for the first time, according to Illion, with an estimated 60,000 mortgage holders at least one month behind on repayments.

But while we are weighed down with unavoidable repayments on big assets, the retail calendar rolls on. Easter is next (luckily the major supermarkets stock around 50 lines of chocolate each, not counting millions of Easter buns), then comes Mother’s Day (May 14), when consumer spending spikes to around $2 billion, according to the Australian Retail Association.

From mid-year there’s often a string of birthdays to buy for: the most popular months for birthdays in Australia include May, July, August, September and October, according to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare.

Anyone who has hosted a children’s birthday party knows how expensive and high pressure they can be, with parents forking out anywhere between A$300 and A$3000. Then there’s the angst over how to please teenagers and other loved ones, a worry which is almost always settled by spending at or above our absolute limit.

Around this time, many of us come to accept we can’t afford a splurge we might want – such as a later winter or spring holiday, or a newer car – with so many expenses and December just around the corner.

The pre-holiday gift-giving hasn’t finished yet. Father’s Day is September 3, (on which about A$700 million is spent), followed by weddings and wedding anniversaries galore as the weather warms up. Spring and autumn are most popular seasons, April, September, October and November are the most popular months to get married.

At the end of November, comes the newish retail binge-fest that is Black Friday, when we spent $2.9 billion over that weekend alone.

While it seems like the right thing to show our love by buying new toys, trinkets, treats and gadgets for children, family and friends the cost is in black and white in our online statements.

We spend thousands upon thousands of dollars each year to try and please loved ones, when if the tables were turned, most of us would be happy receiving thoughtful, inexpensive gifts – or even just spending time with friends and loved ones if we knew they were battling financially.

According to the most recent data from the Financial Mindfulness – Financial Stress Index (FSI) Report – September 2020, the vast majority (89%) of us are worried about money. Digging deeper, we are completely overwhelmed (79%), downhearted (82%) and distracted (77%) by our financial situation. Financial Mindfulness estimates the resulting lost productivity costs Australian businesses is $32.14 billion per annum.

AMP’s 2020 Financial Wellness Report in November 2020 found financially stressed employees are ineffective at work for approximately 7.7 hours a week, and absent for a further 1.2 hours a week through sick days.

The report said nearly half of Australian workers are feeling financially stressed for an average of six and a half years or more.

To find out how financial stress affects our health, check out part two in this three part series.

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Shop till you Drop

Shop till you Drop

Shop till you Drop.

We are still on holidays, right? Well the majority of us are enjoying the holidays somewhere with our family and friends.  The hangover from Christmas and New Year is all but over, but one hangover that hasn’t left us is our credit card bill from Christmas and the so-called holiday ‘sales’, financial stress looms.

Chances are we still can be engaged in the frenzy of ‘The Stocktake SALE’, ‘The CLEARANCE SALE’, ‘Super Daily Deals’, ‘50 months interest free, no deposit, no interest (read full terms)’, ‘It’s the Season to SAVE BIG’, ‘After Christmas SALE and CLEARANCE’, etc.

That clever marketing pressure can flick a switch in our brains where we go into a kind of ‘trance’, handing over our credit cards, tapping away now in a cashless society on auto-pilot to suppress those logical thoughts of ‘we really shouldn’t be spending so much’.

According to BetaBait.com (a website helping start-ups connect with early adopters), 88 percent of the total impulse purchases are created primarily because the items are on sale.

Rather than purchasing useful or necessary items, impulse shoppers buy primarily because it puts them in a better mood. In addition, many impulse purchases are made because people feel that they can’t pass up an extremely attractive offer.  Retailers know this all too well and exploit it.

So, what do we do about it?

In a recent interview by Money and Life last month, I was asked to identify some helpful tips to break the cycle of spending and debt.

Dealing with the stress of debt and Christmas

BetaBait.com also found that when people shop with the purpose of buying immediate needs or forgotten items, the rate of compulsive buying falls by 53 percent.

Exactly how much do we spend on our credit cards?

The Australian Retailers Association expected Australians to spend $50 billion between mid-November and Christmas Eve. Aussie shoppers were tipped to spend a further $18 billion nationwide between Boxing Day and 15 January 2018.

According to ARA executive director, Russell Zimmerman, the jump is being driven by online retail. “With Amazon’s recent Australia launch, we are certain that online retail will be a driving force for post-Christmas sales with the ARA and Roy Morgan forecasting the ‘Other Retailing’ category to increase by more than four percent this year.”

Gumtree survey, which has found that Aussies are expecting to spend a staggering $10 billion dollars on Christmas presents alone, equating to more than $700 on gift giving per person.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the Gumtree research also found that almost 9 out of 10 Australians (86 percent) find Christmas puts a strain on their finances, with buying Christmas gifts dubbed as the biggest cause (66%) of this pressure.

The annual consumer survey by US company Statista found shoppers expected to spend an average of US6 on Christmas gifts alone in 2017, not counting other holiday costs and sales spending. This is a massive jump from the 2016 average of US$752.

In 2017, Christmas retail sales are forecast to grow to about 680.4 billion U.S. dollars; a 3.8 percent increase from 2016. Net result, Americans seem to be in a generous mood of giving more this year.  Does the Trump effect have anything to do with this?

In Australia, the Credit Card Debt Clock is ticking away and ticking upwards.  The MoneySmart clock shows how much Australians owe on credit cards. With around $32 billion owing, that’s an average of around $4,200 per cardholder. https://www.moneysmart.gov.au/borrowing-and-credit/credit-cards/credit-card-debt-clock

In the US, Americans have now hit a scary milestone, the highest credit card debt in U.S history.  According to the Federal Reserve, Americans had US$1.02 trillion in outstanding revolving credit in Oct 2017. When it comes to individual households, the average American family owes US$8,377.

For the first time since the Great Recession, lenders have given more consumers with sub-prime, or below average, credit scores, access to credit cards, but they are giving them lower spending limits, according to the credit reporting agency TransUnion.

So, what does this impulse spending all mean to our Financial Wellbeing

Answer: Financial Stress.

Financial Mindfulness conducted a survey on Financial Stress in Australia and found 1 in 3 Australians suffer Financial Stress.

The results of this press release appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald and the Financial Standard.

Marian Russell, one of Financial Mindfulness Facebook followers shared her personal experience on financial stress in the Sydney Morning Herald article.

New research is constantly being released on the impact financial stress is having on our financial wellbeing and general health worldwide.

According to the European Society of Cardiology, research recently presented at the 18th Annual Congress of the South African Heart Association, significant financial stress is associated with a 13-fold higher odds of having a heart attack.

So how can we get through the holidays not regretting our spending, not dreading the bloated repayments to come, then show up to work without that nagging sense of fear that comes from surviving with financial stress?

The answer lies in applying the principles of mindfulness – the proven practice of moment-by-moment awareness – to our finances. It means training our minds to slow down and make decisions that we won’t regret later.

An Australian start-up – Financial Mindfulness – is developing a financial stress reduction program designed to revolutionise the way we think and behave with our money. In the process, we can stay within our means and feel better about ourselves by saying goodbye to the worry of money.

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Send yourself a valuable gift: get mindful

financialmindfulness blue Background color

Send yourself a valuable gift: get mindful.

Why do we spend money to feel good now, even if it’s clearly going to have negative consequences later? And why do we seem to make better decisions if they are planned and not impulsive?

The answers are complex, but just so you really get the idea, first imagine yourself under a lot of stress. Maybe you are working and studying, so you’re always flat-out busy, and there’s no end in sight. Or perhaps one of your parents is gravely ill and it’s hard to communicate about this with siblings you don’t get on with.

So you should feel really stressed.

Then without thinking, say which of these following suggestions sounds like a great idea a/ now, or b / in five years time: buying two pairs of the same fancy shoes you like because they are on sale, or selling your car today for $500 less than you could probably get because a buyer is ready with the cash and you want a weekend away.

You probably favour option a/ in most cases, meaning you want the ‘reward’ now.

Why? Because, according to behavioural scientists, “present rewards are weighted more heavily than future ones. Once rewards are very distant in time, they cease to be valuable,” so says behaivoraleconomics.com.

This was the finding of landmark research done in 2002 by Shane Frederick, George Loewenstein and Ted O’Donohue, and published in the Journal of Economic Literature.

Interestingly, when the reward is delayed, we are more prepared to wait to receive a greater reward. Research shows if given the choice between $100 in a year or $120 in 13 months, we will probably wait.

All this suggests if we plan for the future we are likely to make better decisions about money.  But it depends what that future event is, and how far off it is.
If it’s a skiing holiday in the Canadian Rockies, we will probably swing into action. If it’s retirement at age 70 (as the Australian Federal Government proposes from 2035), that feels somewhat less urgent, even though few would argue it’s more important.

In a 2014 report on savings, the Reserve Bank of Australia showed “younger households place more weight on saving for large purchases and emergencies to smooth near-term consumption rather than saving for longer-term (retirement) consumption.”

“Keys to managing decisions like these are to make those far-off outcomes feel closer,” Peter Sokol-Hessner, assistant professor in the department of psychology at University of Denver, told The Huffington Post.

He suggested “to imagine how you’ll feel when you can use those retirement funds, how grateful you’ll be that your younger self sent this gift into the future.”

If that sounds like a fairy story, there is research to back up the idea that we are more careful as ‘our future selves’. A study run by UCLA Anderson School of Management in 2011 found when people visualised themselves as 70 and were asked to imagine what they’d do with a $1000 windfall, they put more than twice as much money towards their retirement as those who were asked to visualise themselves now. They were more likely to choose short-term options like planning an extravagant outing or buying someone a gift.
So where does mindfulness come in?

Let’s be clear: a mindfulness practice, even one focused on money, isn’t going to directly impact your Canadian Rockies ski fund, let alone your retirement savings.

But if undertaken consistently, a mindfulness practice could help change the decisions you currently unconsciously make about spending.
For instance, you may decide to do extra research before selling your car or home, looking more carefully at trends and brainstorming other ways to find ready cash.

It does that by increasing time between your thoughts: that well-worn but accurate metaphor of busy thoughts as clouds against a blue sky that represents an untroubled mind.

“Thoughts are like clouds,” says Financial Mindfulness’s Chief Mindfulness Officer Tomas Jajesnica.

“When you can see more sky and less clouds you start to move out of an immediate, involuntary response state and towards the type of thought where you could think about your ‘future self’.”

A big benefit of a regular practice is a buffer against the power of marketing, he says. Think about the hype involved around the release of the next stage of a sought-after apartment development: it’s in the interests of a real estate agent to get you into a feeding frenzy state with other potential buyers, so the stage sells put, the project can go up and the next stage goes into marketing overdrive.

“But it’s not just effective in dealing with real estate,” Jajesnica says.
“A lot of marketing works on the idea of scarcity and urgency; some saying ‘quick, there’s only 100 in stock’ , or ‘hurry, it’s a brand new order’, or whatever. Marketing works on you by getting you to make a decision right now.

“A mindfulness process will help you to buy things rather than just be sold to.
“It’ll allow you to come from your own space, consider the consequences of your actions and respond by making decisions, rather than be manipulated by marketing.”

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Find your pulse, stop impulse buying

Retirement Orange

Find your pulse, stop impulse buying

Who hasn’t indulged in a little retail therapy from time to time, especially after a shocking day at work, or an argument with your partner?

It often seems like a good time to buy a pair of new shoes perhaps, go to a movie or buy an album, a bottle of wine, a therapeutic massage to de-stress or even sign up to a gym membership.

So it can feel a little impulsive to spend money we haven’t budgeted on, so what? On the surface it seems like we are taking care of ourselves: doing something to comfort ourselves to deal with the anger or frustration of having our feelings trampled, or not living up to our own or someone else’s expectations.

According to a poll of 1003 consumers by US website creditcards.com, five out of six American admit to impulse buying. One in five people had spent more than US$1000 on impulse, which rose to one in three for people earning over US$75,000.

Spending money impulsively can make you ‘feel better’ and ‘more alive’. It can certainly seem exciting, and it’s hardly as reckless as taking drugs or gambling, right?

But it can be a serious problem if this is something we begin to regularly, or with expensive items, as a way of coping. And let’s face it, jobs and relationships – and life in general – can be stressful for extended periods.

Fortunately there are plenty of strategies to manage your impulse buying urges –according to BetaBait.com (a website helping start-ups connect with early adopters) you are much less likely to buy on impulse if you plan your shopping trip or walk to the shops rather than drive.

It found that sales are a trigger for impulse spenders (a staggering 88 per cent of impulse buys are items “on sale” – even if you didn’t need that item). It also said impulse spending often happens when you feel “angry, stressed, guilty or bored”.

Let’s consider that last point: when you feel “angry, stressed, guilty of bored”. Anyone would admit the issues making us angry, stressed, guilty and bored – or sad, or ashamed, or lonely – are not solved by a bottle (or a case) of wine, or upgrading computer or bike or car, or booking a holiday or seeing a movie.

Chances are we are just escaping feelings which will overwhelm us again in a few hours or days.

Working through complex and difficult problems is of course not easy. But we also forget what a hugely painful thing financial stress is. Ask yourself honestly, is your impulse buying adding to your financial stress?

Financial worries are now accepted as a leading cause of stress in people’s lives throughout the western world.

“Member financial wellness, engagement and measurable behaviour change is what we are aiming for. Members learn through awareness and education to build sustainable healthy habits.” says Financial Mindfulness Founder & CEO, Andrew Fleming.