In this episode, Eric explores strategies to navigate Cyber Monday without overspending or derailing your financial goals. Cyber Monday, paired with Black Friday, creates a shopping frenzy, making it easy to blow through budgets. Here are the key takeaways:

1. Avoid Unnecessary Purchases: You don’t have to participate in Cyber Monday. Spending on items you wouldn’t normally buy isn’t saving, even if they’re discounted.
2. Set a Budget and Prioritize: Create a holiday spending plan and a prioritized wish list to avoid impulsive purchases. Stick to your budget by cutting items that exceed your spending limit.
3. Shop Around: Use tools like Google Shopping, Wirecutter, and “camelcamelcamel” to compare prices and verify discounts. Beware of misleading deals where prices are temporarily raised before Cyber Monday.
4. Bundle Deals and Cash-Back Offers: Look for product bundles or cash-back rewards to maximize value. Use tools like Rakuten, Honey, or credit card portals to stack discounts and cashback.
5. Be Strategic with Credit Cards: Use cashback or rewards credit cards only if you can pay off the balance in full to avoid interest.
6. Sign Up for Alerts: Subscribe to store newsletters or notifications temporarily for early deals, but don’t hesitate to unsubscribe later.
7. Avoid Debt: Don’t go into debt for non-essential purchases. Plan ahead and save throughout the year for the holidays to eliminate financial stress.

Eric Rosenberg:

This is a friendly reminder that today’s episode is intended for education and entertainment purposes only and should not be considered financial or legal advice. Hello, my friends. Welcome back to The Good Cents by Payactiv Podcast. As always, I’m your host Eric Rosenberg, and today we are talking about one of the biggest days of the year to spend money, and that’s Cyber Monday. Now back to back, we have Black Friday, which focuses more on traditional retail stores, and Cyber Monday, which is the online shopping equivalent, but really the whole long weekend and really even the weeks before and after have turned into a giant shopping extravaganza, which makes it one of the easiest times of the year to blow through your budget and spend way more than you can afford. So today we’re going to look at a few tips and discuss how we can make sure we get the most savings out of Cyber Monday without wrecking our budget and spending more than we can afford.

All right, everyone, so let’s dive in with our top tips to save on Cyber Monday. So the first one that I want to get into is knowing that you don’t have to spend money on Black Friday or Cyber Monday at all. It’s not necessary. I remember one time way back in the day, I was visiting family out of town and they were so excited about the Black Friday deals. I felt like I was getting their energy. I had to go get a new DVD player maybe, you can see how dated this memory is, or a new video game. There were so many cool electronic deals and I remember lining up with my family before sunrise. We woke up way before dawn, had a coffee in hand, and the moment the doors opened, we ran in to get those super limited deals that most people don’t really get.

But when I think back, I don’t know if those really were the best deals because I probably didn’t need those things anyway. I didn’t need a new DVD player. I didn’t need a new TV. I didn’t need new video games. I didn’t need any of it. I didn’t need to feel as compelled as I did to go take advantage of deals because, even if it says you’re saving a certain amount, if it’s something you would’ve not bought anyway, you’re not really saving. Of course, we know this. The deals try to get us to latch in and feel like we’re saving money, but if you spend $10 on something instead of $15, maybe you saved $5 if you were going to buy that anyway. But if not, it just costs you $10 you really didn’t want to spend to begin with. So tip number one, get in that mindset. You don’t have to participate in Cyber Monday or Black Friday at all.

But now let’s say you do know there are certain things you want to get. Maybe you have a holiday budget already set. You can listen back to some of our older episodes all about holiday budgeting and understanding how to automatically save1 and get ready for holiday spending so you don’t have to go into debt during the holidays. But let’s say you do have a list, maybe a few family members, maybe a friend or two that you really do want to buy a gift or maybe you’ve been waiting to get to this time in the year to replace something at home. Maybe you have some broken down items that you need to replace or maybe there was an upgrade you’ve been saving up for because it’s okay to spend your money on those things that you want as long as you’ve budgeted and saved for them and can afford them.

If you want to buy something on Cyber Monday, we’ll use Amazon as an example here, it’s also important to shop around. Look at Walmart. Look at Target. Look at Best Buy. Look at department stores. You can use tools like Google’s Shopping Search. There’s a lot of different ways to find good deals online. You can even look at some different newspapers and media sources that have pages and articles dedicated to the day. One that I like is Wirecutter. You can look there for electronics deals because I’m a computer nerd. But if you’re going to buy something anyway, definitely don’t just focus on one place. Even though one might be the most convenient or the place you shop most often, there’s no reason you have to stick with that on Cyber Monday. You should definitely shop around and try to find the best deals wherever they might be for that item.

Next, make sure it’s actually a deal. There’s this upsetting trend, upsetting to me at least, where companies like Amazon and businesses that sell on Amazon, and a lot of people might not realize if you’re shopping on Amazon, you could be buying from a third party that uses Amazon just to connect them with buyers like us. Whoever you’re buying from, you can see on the checkout page who that is. It’s a good idea on Cyber Monday to make sure it’s really a good deal. What they’ll do is, a day or two or maybe a week before Black Friday or Cyber Monday, they’ll raise the price of an item a whole lot, and then right when Cyber Monday starts, they’ll drop it back to the regular price. And why would they do that? If you compare it to yesterday’s price or last week’s price, it might be 20%, 30%, 40%, 50% lower, but in reality, it’s the same price that you might’ve been paying if you had just bought the thing two weeks ago.

And there’s a site I personally like to use to make sure I don’t get fooled by a deal like that. It’s called “camelcamelcamel”. Yeah, I’m talking about like camels in the desert. You type in “camelcamelcamel”, three times into your browser. It’s a free app and if you’re on the computer it’s easiest, but it works on mobile devices too. If you copy the link to the item you’re thinking about buying, and if you’re on mobile, you can click the Share button to copy that link, and paste it into camelcamelcamel and hit search. It will show you the price history for virtually every item on Amazon. So I can see what was this priced at last week, last month, and last year. You might find that it’s the best price ever, which is awesome. That’s a time you probably want to move forward and buy that if you were going to buy it anyway. But if you find that it’s not really that great of a deal, that’s a good time to pass and skip buying that item.

Next, make a prioritized wish list. So let’s say you’ve saved up $500 for your holiday budget. If Cyber Monday comes around and you find a good list of deals, but it would take you over your $500 budget, you have some decisions to make. Maybe you have one cart at walmart.com or something like that, or multiple carts across various stores. If those add up to more than $500 and your budget was $500, it’s time to find a place to cut back. So by prioritizing your wish list ahead of time before you even know what the deals are, you know this is the most important thing. And once you go through your list and hit $500, anything lower than there on the list gets cut away. That prevents you from overspending on things you weren’t planning on.

The dopamine rush, the adrenaline of shopping and knowing, oh, I’m going to get this cool thing, it’s much easier to do on Cyber Monday or Black Friday because, unlike the rest of the year, we usually give the tip wait 24 hours or wait 72 hours or wait a week if there’s something you want before you decide to buy it. But with Cyber Monday, it’s only a day so you have to decide more or less right away. And especially when you find some of those lightning deals or time deals where a certain number will be sold and they’re gone or the deal will be over in an hour or two if you don’t hit the checkout button, that can put a lot of pressure on you to buy right away. But by setting a firm budget ahead of time and prioritizing your purchases, you can avoid the temptation of buying too much and overspending.

It’s just not worth going into debt or going over budget for wants. If it’s something you really need, as we said in the beginning, that’s a need, and if you can find a deal on it, that’s great. But for things that would be just nice to have, it’s usually not worth going into debt, especially if it’s expensive credit card debt that could cost you maybe 20% a year. If you do that, maybe you buy a $100 item after a year that would cost you 120, and that’s more than it looks like upfront, of course. Plus, you have tax and all the other stuff, maybe shipping. So really do your best to not go over budget, especially if that means you will go into debt.

Next, look at different bundle deals. I know my kids, they all want things like smartphones and the newest video game system like a Nintendo Switch. I know that’s not the newest one anymore, but whatever the newest thing is, that’s what they want. But I know when I buy something like that, I could go to the store and buy it alone, but often, especially around this time of year, you might get a bundle that gives you a better value for the same price. I did get my kids a Nintendo Switch a few years ago for the holidays, and when I did it, I didn’t just buy them the plain vanilla switch.

I waited and found a deal, and on the day of the deal, I was able to get a game that would’ve normally cost $60 included for no extra charge. So even though I paid the same price I would’ve all year for that Nintendo, I saved $60 because I was able to get that game thrown in for free. And that game, if you’re curious, was Mario Kart, and they still play it all the time. So it was worth waiting for my family to get that Nintendo on a deal during the Black Friday, Cyber Monday season because I could get that game for free.

Next, we’re ahead of the holiday right now, and I’m calling it a holiday, but we’re ahead of Cyber Monday or ahead of Black Friday if you’re listening live. You can sign up for newsletters and app notifications and text messages from your favorite stores or sellers or brands ahead of time, and they might send you early deals or exclusive deals just because you signed up. Now, they’re going to do that to try to get you hooked in to stay on that newsletter or text message newsletter for months and years to come, and they’ll keep trying to sell you stuff, but it only takes one or two clicks to unsubscribe or you just type “stop” in the text message and they’ll stop messaging you.

But to be on that list for a week or two leading up to Cyber Monday and Black Friday, it might help you get extra savings. And when it’s those things like we talked about in the beginning, things that prioritize, planned items that you want to purchase, let’s say maybe you’re looking to get a new mattress, you could sign up for several mattress newsletters from some of those big direct seller companies and you can get an idea ahead of time where you can find the best deal, the best bang for your buck, as we say.

Finally, if you don’t have any debt, you can think about how to use credit cards to save even more. If you use a cash-back credit card, you’ll often find you can save %1.5 or 2% cash back. I’d only recommend using credit cards if you’re able to pay them off in full every month by the due date. If you don’t do that, your chances are you’re going to spend way more on interest than you get back from cash back. So keep that in mind. This tip is only for people who pay off their cards in full every month by the due date. So you can use cash back credit cards, and if you have a card like, I’ll use the Amazon card as an example, you’ll get 5% back there. But on Cyber Monday, sometimes they elevate the cash back.

One time, actually, I used microphones for podcasting, I needed to get a better microphone that was on my to do list. I’d planned ahead. And then in the days leading up to Cyber Monday, they said, “If you buy now, you’ll get 20% cash back on these certain brands of microphones.” So I took advantage. It was something I was going to buy anyway. So for me, that cash-back deal was a huge value. You can also sometimes stack cash-back offers. So there’s these third-party websites like Rakuten, that’s R-A-K-U-T-E-N. There’s a handful of them out there. There’s an app that you can get from PayPal. It’s a browser plugin that’s called Honey. There’s also a plugin if you use Capital One as your bank, they offer it for free.

But there’s several shopping apps that if you click through that website or that app or even many credit card issuers offer these kinds of deals, you can get elevated rewards. So if you can click through a link, maybe you’ll get 5% back through that shopping portal, and then you get another 2% back from your credit card. You just stacked that up to 7% cashback. So if it’s a big purchase, that 7% could be quite a big savings. Also, look for retail or specific coupons. Maybe you find a specific coupon for a store that you know you’re going to shop at anyway. You can also look for different bonus points and online shopping tips. There’s sites like hopcashback.com that will help you figure out the best way to navigate those cash-back deals.

But again, if you were not going to make those purchases anyway, you’re not saving anything. You’re just spending more than you planned. So it’s okay to just take the day off Cyber Monday if you have work. Don’t worry about buying extra things. Just focus on your job, go home, hang out with your friends or your family. Do your regular Monday. You don’t have to spend anyway. But if you are, following these tips can make sure you don’t blow through your budget and you get the best actual savings in the long run.

Well, I hope you found those strategic money-saving tips helpful. I know I can get excited about Cyber Monday just like everyone else, but if I plan ahead and stick to my budget, I will end up financially ahead from that day rather than under a pile of debt or spending regret. We definitely don’t like that feeling of having spent money and regretting it later, or what we call the holiday debt hangover that many of us have to deal with in January. So do spend thoughtfully around Cyber Monday. And if you’re starting to save up for next year’s Cyber Monday now, which we definitely encourage, make sure to check out the Payactiv app¹.

If you have a direct deposit to your Payactiv account, you can use the Payactiv card to track your spending and understand where your money is going automatically with different budget categorizations. And you can also set a portion of your paycheck to automatically go into a savings² pool that you can tap into next year when Cyber Monday rolls around without having to touch a credit card or even think about going into debt.

So thank you all. If you are not already a member, make sure to go to the Google Play Store or the Apple App Store to install the Payactiv app. You can get started very quickly. I’m a member myself, and I love all of the financial wellness tools I get for free, and we want to give that to you too. And you don’t just get those deals on Cyber Monday. You can use those free resources all year round. So thank you again all so much for listening till the end. And until next time, keep living the life you’ve earned.

¹ Standard data rates from your wireless service provider may apply.

² Goal-based saving is a set-aside account, and you will not receive interest or other earnings on the funds within the goal-based account.

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