Having a Christmas Club Account Through Your Bank: Are They Worth It?

Saving your hard-earned money is wise. Putting some away for those special spending times, even wiser. Look at the upcoming holiday season for instance. Christmas can be a difficult time of the year. With all of the family getting together, running to and fro looking for the perfect gift, fighting crowds; now is not the time to have the added stress of running short on money. Sure you could use credit cards for your purchases, and a lot of people do, but what if there was an easier way? Would it be worth it to you to know that you can and will have the money set aside to help fulfill all of your family's Christmas gift wishes when the time comes?

One way that you can do this is to make a simple phone call or stop by your local bank, and inquire about a Christmas Club account. A good number of banks offer this service to their customers. Most Christmas Club accounts can be easily customized to fit into your weekly or monthly budget, allowing for the money to be deposited without you even missing a penny.

When you are looking into opening a Christmas Club account, be sure to ask what other sorts of helpful features go along with it. For instance, the bank that I use offer these accounts with no minimum balance requirements, competitive interest rates, direct deposits (taken straight out of the paycheck, with the deposit amounts specified), one free withdrawal of the funds, and no monthly maintenance fees.

Consider this: Let's say that you choose to open a Christmas Club account, and your bank offers close to the same features as mine does. You can open the account during the first week in January, with say, a fifty dollar deposit. Now you can set it up to where twenty dollars can be direct deposited to the Christmas Club account out of your weekly paycheck. That's fifty dollars (with the initial deposit), plus an extra twenty dollars a week for forty eight weeks. This will allow for withdrawing the money in the account the first week in December for your Christmas shopping. Without even adding up any interest that your account may have accrued, that gives you a little over a thousand dollars to spend for Christmas!