Keeping your sanity intact in sales season

Customers are also becoming more aware of how stores set their prices.

Some major retailers, including the online variety, boost their prices quite early in the year with the goal of dropping them, to recommended retail levels, closer to Christmas. What appears in the holiday season to be a real bargain may not be such a great deal after all.

Shoppers, then, are becoming more savvy, which is no bad thing. Trading may have shifted somewhat from the offline to the online world, but we are still buying stuff big-time come the holiday season.

It's worth remembering, though, that a bargain is not a bargain if you don't really need it, or if you're relying on over-extended credit to cover the purchase.

Just prior to Christmas 2010, when we were still in thrall to our worst recession in 30 years, economic indicators suggested that Brits were becoming better savers.

Yet post-Christmas sales that year told a different story. They revealed that the consumption lifestyle of the freewheeling Noughties still maintained a powerful grip on the national psyche.

Now as then, some holiday shoppers will act according to a carefully laid out plan. Many more, though, will buy things just because they're on sale, even if the discount isn't as real as it might appear.

If we're to steer ourselves and our families into a full financial recovery - and, more importantly, avoid boom-and-bust cycles in future - we need to make spending frugally more of a lifestyle choice.

We need to become more disciplined about our consumption, without going to the other extreme of living in constant austerity.

One of the gloomiest recurring news stories these days relates to year-on-year growth in national debts and borrowing levels.

In 2009, the gross US federal debt - the gross amount of debt issued by the US Treasury - stood at $11.9 trillion. Today, it has grown to over $17 trillion. That's $53,000 of debt for every person in the country.

According to the US Treasury, almost half of the debt is owed to foreign investors, the largest being the People's Republic of China and Japan.