The holidays are all about celebrating with loved ones, but the excitement can easily be overshadowed by financial stress. To keep your season joyful—and debt-free—try these practical holiday spending strategies. Before you shop, decide how much you can spend without affecting your regular bills and needs. Your holiday budget should cover gifts, decorations, food, travel, and any extra expenses. Assign each category a spending limit and add up the totals to make sure you’re within your means. This gives you a clear spending roadmap and helps prevent surprises later.

Presenting a vision of what the future might look like has been an obsession for creative minds in science, literature, and popular culture for centuries. In recent years, an endless string of movies has been produced by Hollywood depicting various forms of the apocalypse, whether in the form of a natural disaster, an alien invasion, worldwide epidemic, or just about anything else you can imagine. My personal favorite is the classic “The Terminator”. In the highly unlikely event you haven’t seen it, the plot centers on the premise that an artificial intelligence (AI) system named Skynet becomes “self-aware” and on its own initiates a nuclear holocaust.

Thanksgiving is a time for gratitude, family, and of course, a delicious meal. However, with food costs on the rise, hosting a traditional feast can put a strain on your wallet. The good news is you don't have to sacrifice tradition to stick to a budget. With some smart planning, you can create a memorable dinner that everyone will love without overspending.