Christmas Savings Clubs are on the increase in these straightened times according to reports. Despite the collapse of Farepak three years ago, people in their thousands still entrust their hard-earned cash to Savings Clubs up and down the country.

We’ll return to the subject of Savings Clubs in more detail at a later date, but why is it today that everything, including saving, has to be so complicated when it is at its core such a simple matter?

Saving is the simple act of setting aside a proportion of income for a specific or non-specific purpose. In the case of a Christmas Savings Club, obviously the purpose of setting aside a proportion of income in that case is to save towards Christmas.

One of the reasons that commercial Christmas Savings Clubs work, despite the poor value they offer, is because those individuals who save with them cannot trust themselves not to spend any money they set aside throughout the year.

Now for such individuals there is clearly no point in us suggesting using a simple money box or a basic Bank or Post Office Savings Account despite the fact that they offer better value, because such individuals could not be trusted not to raid them when things got tight.

There’s clearly also no point in suggesting a psychological device as simple as ‘deducting’ a weekly or monthly sum from your cheque book stub so that that sum appears to have been spent, but actually leaving it in your bank account and simply keeping a separate track of the running total. In other words spending the money on paper, but not actually spending it at all (pretending to spend it), although the fact that you have spent it on paper means that you cannot spend it again because you can only spend any amount of money once. Confused?

Okay then, what about the simple, old-fashioned Tontine or common or garden family savings club? You simply elect a trusted family member - generally someone in their Third Age - as the treasurer, and give them an agreed weekly sum to put aside for you.

In days gone by, whole families saved towards Christmas in this simple but effective manner. Starting in the first week of January, each family member would give their mother, father, grandparent or whoever was elected as treasurer that weekly cash sum. It would be recorded in a simple notebook, and withdrawn and redistributed at an agreed date generally a couple of weeks before Christmas. How complicated is that?

Because it’s an agreed (and affordable) weekly sum, everyone knows exactly how much they will have saved and therefore how much is due to them when the time comes.

Because there are numerous savers and everyone likely to know the other’s business, it is that much harder to fall off the wagon because everyone else is likely to know.

You can buy your Christmas goodies with ‘real’ money, getting the best value for your savings without paying a premium as you do with traditional Christmas Savings Clubs.

It’s a no-brainer surely!

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