If you’re suffering from a Christmas debt hangover, consider taking a different route for your Christmas shopping next year. Instead of paying for your Christmas presents with credit cards, develop a savings plan so that you can save up for your Christmas Gifts and then have all the money that you need in November to make your purchases.

One service that will do an excellent job of helping you along the way to developing your savings goal is SmartyPig. SmartyPig is a goal-based savings account that helps you save up for specific financial goals and provides you rewards for doing so.

The first thing that you’ll want to do is establish a dollar amount that you want to spend for your Christmas gifts. Consider all of the people that you want to shop for and come up with a dollar amount for each person. Total up the amount and you know how much money that you need to save.

If you already have a SmartyPig savings account, you can simply create a new savings goal with the amount of money that you need to save for Christmas. If you don’t have a SmartyPig account, you can set one up in a few minutes using SmartyPig’s website. SmartyPig’s savings calculator will rightfully tell you that you will need to save up 1/11^th or 1/12^th of your savings amount each month into your SmartyPig savings account.

SmartyPig will setup an automatic savings plan that will automatically transfer funds from your checking account into your SmartyPig savings account each month, then when shopping time comes around during the next Christmas season, SmartyPig will tell you that you’ve met your goals and then you’ll be able to redeem your funds via a transfer back to your checking account or in the form of gift cards.

The benefit of using gift cards is that you can get a bonus on your money. If you had a $1000 savings goal and redeemed the gift in the form of Macy’s gift cards, you would actually get $1,120 back for your money (a 12% bonus). There are other gift card options to a number of retailers including Amazon, Kmart, Best Buy and a few other places.

Once you get your savings back in the form of cash or gift cards, you can begin your Christmas shopping without ending up in a heap of credit card debt after Christmas is over.

SmartyPig is a goal-based FDIC-insured online savings account that allows consumers to save for specific goals and helps consumers develop automatic savings plans to meet their goals. Once consumers have met their savings goal, they have the option to redeem their goals for cash or redeem them in the form of gift cards at major retailers.

Typically most consumer advocates would not recommend that consumers turn cash into gift cards, but in the case of SmartyPig, consumers receive rewards for turning the funds from their savings goals into gift cards to make the purchase they are going to make. If you’re going to spend the money at the retailer anyway, there’s no reason you shouldn’t take the bonus available to you.

If you’re doing general shopping, Overstock, Amazon, Kmart, Best Buy, Gap, Kohls, Macy’s and Sears all offer bonuses of at least 4%. The best bonus available to you is at Macy’s which provides a 12% bonus on the amount that you put into gift cards.

If you plan on doing any shopping for sporting goods or outdoors equipment, Cabelas and Bass Pro Shops offer bonuses of 5% and 6% respectively

If you’re going to do any travelling with your savings goal, both Sandals Resorts and Travelocity offer 10% discounts on gift cards used for travel packages.

You should probably only make use of SmartyPig’s gift card option if you know that the item you want to purchase is available at one of these retailers. You’ll also want to make sure that it’s not cheaper at another retailer that doesn’t offer the bonus. The bonus you receive may not be enough to make up for the difference in price.

There are many cases where redeeming your SmartyPig savings goal does make a lot of sense though. If this isn’t the case for you, you can always redeem your savings for SmartyPig’s Debit MasterCard or have the funds transferred back to your savings account via an electronic transfer.

SmartyPig provides savers with an innovative ways to save for major purchases. The SmartyPig savings account helps consumers establish specific financial goals to save for and allows others to contribute to your savings goal. When SmartyPig first launched its product, there were a number of fees that consumers had to pay, but SmartyPig listened to the complaints that it received from its savers and have moved to a much more reasonable fee structure.

Here’s an overview of the SmartyPig fees that you will pay on a SmartyPig Savings Account:

• There is no fee to open a SmartyPig account.
• There are no monthly account fees.
• There are no fees to redeem your savings via electronic transfer, a debit MasterCard or via gift card. You may even get a bonus on your funds if you redeem your savings in the form of a gift card.
• If you want to contribute to your SmartyPig account or a friend’s savings goal using a credit card, you are charged a 2.9% fee to cover the credit card transaction costs.
• If you redeem your SmartyPig savings via MasterCard and lose the card, there is a $6.00 fee to cancel the current debit card and get a new debit card. The SmartyPig Debit MasterCard charges no ATM or load fees. Previously, the fee for a SmartyPig MasterCard replacement was $20.00, but has recently lowered the fee.
• If you overdraw your account, you will be charged a $27.00 NSF fee.

The fees that SmartyPig charge its customers have gotten much more reasonable in the last year and are relatively easy to avoid. The big fee to avoid is the fee related to using credit cards for payments. To avoid this, simply fund your SmartyPig savings account with an electronic transfer from your checking account. If you properly manage your account balances and don’t lose the SmartyPig Debit MasterCard (if you choose to use that as your redemption method) you will be free and clear from any SmartyPig Fees on the SmartyPig Savings Account.