If your company gives you more than a ham and a lame party for Christmas, consider yourself lucky.

While many of you are busy buying gifts for Christmas, decorating your house with lights and other festive items and making a list of new year resolutions, others are getting significant Christmas or year-end bonuses and need to figure out what to do with their money.

If you aren’t the lucky group of people who get year-end or Christmas bonuses, you can go on and read the next post. Maybe in time, you will have a job that offers such perks. If you do plan on receiving a bonus this year, there are some decisions you need to make. While it might be rather exciting to splurge on that 80-inch plasma television, there are smarter ways in which you can spend your bonus money. Shred Monkeys, your Orlando paper shredding service, offers you better ways to spend your holiday bonus.

 

Knock Out Debt

We understand, this isn’t the most enjoyable or rewarding way to spend your bonus, but it is one of the smartest ways to spend it. When using your holiday bonus to knock down debt, you will get rid of it much faster.

Think about it in terms of how much money this will save you in the long run not having to pay so much in interest. The more money you can save yourself right now means more money you can spend on yourself in the future.

Take a Vacation

By January 2, you will have spent the last six weeks cooking and hosting two major dinners, Thanksgiving and Christmas, shopped gifts for dozens of people, wrapped said gifts and placed them under a tree you cut and decorated and all of this while working a full-time job.

Basically, the holiday season was busy, very bust like it is every year. And by the time January 2 rolls around, you are exhausted and need a break from it all. Which is why you should use your bonus money to take a nice vacation.

You and the spouse could escape to some romantic destination, or just some place where you can get rested up for the new year.

Boost Your Retirement Funds

We know you don’t want to hear this again, but you really need to plan well for your future. You never know what retirement has in store for you, and you don’t want to wind up not able to live the life you hoped after retirement. Whether you are 25 or 55, investing any extra money you can into your retirement fund is a smart choice.

If you are the type who need hard numbers to be convinced, check this out. If you were to put $2,000 into your retirement account today, it could be worth as much as $20,000 in 20 years. Not a bad nest egg.

Emergency Fund

We are so sorry that many of these ideas on how to spend your bonus are so darned not very fun, but that is just how life is sometimes. Anyway, another way to spend your bonus is to simply put it aside in an emergency fund.

You never know what is going to happen tomorrow, next month or even next year. Over the course of a year, you could be forced to replace your furnace, have a major repair done to your car or have an injury or illness that requires a lot of out-of-pocket expenses. It is when these emergencies come up that you are grateful to have money put away for such occasions.

Give it Away

Treat your family to a great meal at the local steakhouse and give the rest of the money to a charity of your choice. While eating your prime rib and baked potato, ask the rest of the family which charity they think would benefit most if they had extra money. Make the decision who to contribute to a family affair.

Remodel

If your kitchen is as dated as Tom Brady’s haircut, then perhaps it is time to spend some of that bonus money on kitchen upgrade and remodel. You might not be aware, but yellow kitchen tiles went out of style 35 years ago and your refrigerator still screams 1999.

Do you want to know another good idea? Call Shred Monkeys for reliable paper shredding services in Orlando.