The holidays are upon us and if you haven’t done your Christmas shopping yet, chances are it’s because you are dreading the price tag attached to your loved ones’ desired gifts.
Inflation is on the rise, groceries seem to cost a small fortune and retail goods are also at a record high cost.
A personal finance firm, HelloSafe Canada, conducted a survey to see how Canadians’ spending behaviour would change given the current financial landscape.
According to HelloSafe, 66.2% of BC residents are changing their spending intentions due to inflation with 48.4% of British Columbians said they’re planning on spending less money.
Most notably, British Columbians say their average gift budget is $490 per household this year.
The national average total spending on gifts per household was $444, so BC residents are still planning to spend more than their neighbouring provinces despite the amount of people saying they will spend less.
- Ontario’s Christmas gift budget – $503 per family
- Alberta’s Christmas gift budget – $447 per family
- Quebec’s Christmas gift budget – $390 per family
When asked, “Will inflation have an impact on your Christmas purchases this year,” 66.2% of British Columbians said yes on HelloSafe’s survey.
This was the lowest among all provinces’ answers to that same question with the national average being 72.5%.
When asked “What are you willing to do for Christmas to face inflation,” only 20.1% of British Columbians said that they would change nothing, while 38.7% said they’d give less expensive gifts and 22.6% said they’d give less gifts.
Christmas is less than two weeks away now and the financial burden is clearly being felt by BC as well as the rest of the country.
HelloSafe say they conducted the survey that produced these statistics from November 11th to November 30th with 821 Canadians who were representative of the demographic and geographic diversity of each province.
