While walking through Target one fine September day, I came across aisles upon aisles of Halloween costumes and decorations. There were pumpkin baskets and paper spiders and witches and skeletons and bats. The walls were stuffed with candy, so much so that my fillings hurt just looking at it. I was overwhelmed by the overwhelming amount of Halloween décor. And I was confused because, as far as I could remember, it was still September and Halloween was a good seven weeks away.

My how time flies, or at least how bigbox retail stores make it seem that way. Target is far from the only one pushing holidays on consumers one after the other. Once we dispense with one holiday, the next is up on shelves beckoning us to get festive or get out. 4th of July party poppers in May? Easter bunnies in February? Arbor Day saplings in August? There seems to be no stopping the over-commercialization and constant bombardment of early holiday jitters.

Well, there is almost no stopping.

The pressure of the holidays is a stress upon all of us, whether we choose to admit it or not. Some have a hard time handling the family and friends, and others struggle with the financial commitment of decorations, travel, presents, and more. My solution: celebrate a holiday after it has passed.

Christmas on the 28th, New Year's on the 2nd, and Halloween well into November. It's the way to do it, especially if you want to save a little hassle and save a lot of money. With the rest of the country so obsessed with going, going, going, you should consider stopping, watching the hustle and bustle parade in front of you, and taking the time to wait and enjoy yourself rather than stress out.

There are several benefits to a belated holiday schedule, and all of them seem to revolve around saving money and saving stress.

For many, the money issue might be the biggest one around the holidays, which is why celebrating the Christmases and Thanksgivings after the fact is a great solution. First off, you can get a great deal on decorations. The day after a holiday ends, stores and shops are going to slash their prices on seasonal merchandise because all that overhead is practically useless to them anymore. Have you ever noticed how the price of a Christmas tree keeps falling and falling the closer it gets to Christmas? It is simply a matter of the sellers getting more and more desperate.

The same economic phenomenon will take place in stores like Target and Walmart, too. Once the holiday has passed, these stores need to make room for the next big date on the calendar. Often times, you can find deals for as much as 75 percent off, simply because you waited patiently for the deal to come.

In addition to great deals with decorations, there are also certain holidays when patience can make gift buying much easier and less expensive. Christmas especially is a great time to wait it out. There are so many great deals on the days after Christmas since so many people are out returning presents and gifts. Stores are anxious to turn returned items into new purchases, so they consistently offer deals that can’t be beat. Those celebrating the holidays late will benefit. Rather than fight the high prices before the holidays, if you wait until after they are over, you can find much better deals on all the items on your wish list.

Saving money is great, but earning money might be even better. The whole world doesn't shut down around the holidays. There are still plenty of places that need workers and staff to work on everyone else's days off. If you celebrate a holiday a day or two later, you would have no problem working on a traditional off-day. And even better, you would earn time-and-a-half. You can't beat that.

The stress you save would be big, too. When you hit the mall or visit a restaurant around a holiday, the place is always packed with people taking advantage of their time off and their time together. Not so with a belated celebration. You and yours will most likely be the only ones still enjoying the festivities, so you will have much less congestion to worry about.

Even the roads would be less busy. Instead of fighting Labor Day traffic, you can enjoy the open road to yourself if you choose to celebrate the weekend after instead.

Understandably, this idea is pretty radical.

Observing holidays when they are not meant to be observed goes against everything that culture and society says. You would be the only ones sitting down to Thanksgiving dinner on a Monday, and you’d have a hard time sharing the holidays with friends or family who don’t abide by the same belated rules as you do.

Plus, some jobs just aren’t flexible enough to support an alternative holiday lifestyle. Most companies give employees days off that are recognized across the country. It is highly unlikely that you could find the same benevolence if you request extra days a week or two later.

This new way of looking at holiday celebrations is obviously not for everyone, but for those concerned with money or stress or time management around Christmas, New Year’s, and the other hairy holidays, celebrating a day or two later might be a tempting option. There is lots of money to save by taking advantage of sales and discounts. There is lots of money to earn by working the days that no one else is willing to work. And there is lots of time, energy, and happiness to spare by taking yourself out of the rat race and doing the holidays on your time and your schedule.

At the very least, it will at least make seeing Halloween decorations in September a little less frustrating.

If you don't know where you're going, who knows where you'll end up? Whether you are trying to get out of debt, start investing, start saving for your child's retirement, or anything else, it's important to have a purpose. Without having any specific goals, it can be very hard to beat your financial worries. However, with goals, you can create a plan: a step-by-step program to meet your goals.

Why is it so hard to set goals?

You've probably heard this advice before somewhere. I remember being told to write down my goals in elementary school, but I never listened to the advice. Planning and writing down my goals always seemed so strange. Something that real people didn't do - something for weird people. A recent article on LifeHacker, Why Goal Setting Makes You Cringe, explains how I felt about goal setting perfectly.

"Life goals are like religious views, salary, age, and weight — highly personal, rarely discussed, and for the ambitious and pie-in-the-sky among us, even embarrassing."

It felt almost embarrassing to write goals!

So why should we set goals anyway?

For starters, several studies have shown a correlation between conscious goals and success on a task. With a list of goals, we know what we want - and we can plan how to get there. Setting goals is the first step in any major undertaking: financial changes, new businesses, scientific studies (you think of a hypothesis before you plan an experiment, right?).

How can I set good goals for myself?

So we need to figure out how to determine good goals. What are the characteristics of well-written, achievable goals? One of the basic frameworks for goal setting is called SMART.

1. Specific
2. Measurable
3. Attainable
4. Relevant
5. Time-bound

All goals should follow these five requirements. For example, the goal “I want to be rich” meets none of the criteria: How do you measure “rich?” When do you want to be rich by?

Instead, you could say, "I want to pay off my $5,000 credit card debt by December, 2009." Now, you have a specific (pay off the debt), measurable (all $5,000), attainable (with a plan), relevant (your finances are relevant to your life and future plans), and time-bound (by December, 2009) goal. You should make a list of all the goals you seriously want to achieve.

Building a list of SMART goals for yourself is the first step in fixing your financial situation. Once you have a list, you can begin designing a program to achieve those goals!

Everybody likes to take a vacation. Some people get away on a regular schedule and others only when they are forced to leave work. Either way, if you like to vacation or you have reached a wall and need a break, here are the initial steps in planning a stress-free vacation, along with some budget and spending tips.

1. Go where you have vacationed before? Or something new? This is a critical first step. If you are going to a vacation spot you have been to before, you will know what to expect and how to estimate the cost of such a vacation. While going to a new place is exciting, it will also have many more unknowns in terms of money and spending.
2. What type of vacation do you want? There’s everything from weekend camping at a national park that is an hour away, to a full three-week international trip. Different types of trips will require different amounts of money and time invested in planning for them.
3. Who is going? And who is paying? Many times it is best to bring other people with you to share the costs. For instance, when you’re in college and going away for spring break, it is best to plan for a group of four. This is because most hotels have two queen beds that sleep four and you will only need to rent one car. And any other expenses that come up can be divided into four, thus saving everybody money.
4. When is the vacation? If you can plan out your vacation far in advance, you will end up saving a lot of money or having a much better and bigger vacation for the same money. Planning far in advance allows you to optimize the days of the week when you travel. You will receive better rates by not traveling during the high season and you will also have the most options available.

Making a simple travel plan is key to having a stress-free vacation and not coming back broke, or even worse, having to dip into credit cards. Start well ahead of your expected vacation, do your homework and you’ll be pleasantly surprised at how affordable vacationing can be.

Despite the well-publicized bank failures and bankruptcies in recent weeks, I continue to see a huge number of consumer banks being built. Tough economic times may drive the demand for such banks, but only those expected to be profitable would actually be built.

At one intersection in an expanding part of town, there are construction sites on all four corners. That area is in desperate need of a post office or gas station, so I’ve been holding out hope that one of the corners would serve that need. As construction progresses, the “Coming Soon” signs have started to go up, disclosing what is being built. Three of the four corners have now posted that banks are being built there. I’m not holding out much hope for the fourth corner because a large concrete square has already been formed in the center of the site. If the other corners were any indication, this will be a vault and the intersection will be home to four different banks.

As I mentioned earlier, demand for banks would only drive a new supply if those banks expected to be profitable. The fact that four banks can be built on one intersection while all remaining financially viable tells you one thing: traditional banks are highly profitable. While banks provide you with a service of both convenience and security, they do so without your best interests in mind. They pay you a tiny amount of interest on the money you give to them and charge a huge amount on the money they give to you. The difference between the minuscule interest on your accounts and the much higher rates they charge on loans is one of the main ways they make money. They need some way to justify constructing their building, paying all of the tellers, etc., and so they must look to recover their costs as quickly as possible.

If you have a financial need, but want a more reasonable spread between borrower and depositor interest rates, consider a P2P loan. With significantly lower overhead costs compared to traditional banks, social lending sites create a situation where all of their customers are treated fairly. Lower costs mean better rates for you, so be sure to consider peer-to-peer lending before borrowing money from that shiny new bank down the street.

In my post, The Gift That Keeps on Taking, I described many of the negatives of gift cards. Recent calls for reform highlight another risk of using gift cards: they only hold value if they continue to be accepted.

The typical case where gift cards may no longer be accepted is when the company issuing the card files for bankruptcy. This situation has occurred in many recent high-profile filings. Brian Riley, senior analyst at The Tower Group, estimated in March that shoppers could lose more than $75 million just from stores and restaurant closings in 2008. Bankruptcies may make cards worthless because sales of cards are not required to be kept separate from other revenue. As a result, a store can issue a gift card, spend the proceeds, and then go bankrupt. In that case, there wouldn’t be any money to refund to the customer.

The simple solution would be to require stores to hold the money from gift card sales in a separate trust account, which could only be drawn from when gift cards were redeemed. That’s precisely the solution being presented by Consumer Union in a petition to the Federal Trade Commission. Their submission was recently covered in this article. Gift card holders do have a claim to the value of their cards in bankruptcy proceedings but are such a low priority that they would rarely see a payout, even for a fraction of what they are owed.

When you add the possibility of cards becoming worthless to the service fees, expiration dates, and other limitations of some gift cards, they become even less appealing. It may be the thought that counts, but we all expect the gifts cards we give to have at least the value that we paid for them. Until the rules surrounding gift cards become more consumer-friendly, it is probably in your best interest to avoid them altogether.