While the winter holidays may seem like a distant memory, the arrival of holiday bills brings them back to reality for many Canadians. According to the RBC 2018 Holiday Spending & Saving Insights Poll, four in ten Canadians (42%) admit they overspent on their budgets – spending on average $530 beyond what they intended.

Regionally, shoppers in Saskatchewan and Manitoba (48%) and Ontario (45%) led the country in overspending their holiday budgets. The amount of money overspent varied widely, from an average of $652 in Ontario to an average of $363 in Saskatchewan and Manitoba.

There also were differences among age groups and genders:

• Shoppers aged 18-34 made up the largest group of overspenders (55%), compared to shoppers aged 35-54 (43%) and 55+ (29%).
• Those aged 35-54 overspent by the most ($565), compared to shoppers aged 18-34 ($556) and 55+ ($436).
• While more women than men overspent this past holiday season (45% women; 38% men), women overspenders spent less money than their male counterparts ($485 vs. $587).

When asked what they would do differently in 2018 to be ready for this year’s holiday expenses, overspenders responded they would plan to save on a regular basis (43%) and plan ahead for holiday spending by budgeting earlier in the year (36%).

There is also a new savings solution, introduced by RBC last fall, to help Canadians save for their holiday season spending and other expenses throughout the year. NOMI Find & Save uses artificial intelligence (AI) to identify funds within clients’ bank accounts that can be automatically moved over into savings.

“We all have the best of intentions to save more for the holiday season and other expenses – but often we struggle to find ways to save that extra money,” explained Vinita Savani, Vice-President, GICs & Savings, RBC. “When we asked Canadians how much they thought they could save each month without really noticing, they estimated around $258 on average – which would really add up over a year, if they could take the time to set that money aside. NOMI Find & Save does this for you. It understands your spending behaviour and saves pockets of money before you have the chance to spend it. These small amounts can then grow into big savings so you’ll be ready for the next holiday season and any other special expenses that may arise.”

More information about NOMI Find & Save is available here; free savings advice and resources are posted here.

RBC 2018 POST-HOLIDAY SPENDING & SAVING INSIGHTS POLL FINDINGS

About RBC’s NOMI Find & Save and NOMI Insights
RBC continues to introduce a variety of digital capabilities to help our clients save and spend wisely, and understand more about their everyday finances, under the umbrella of NOMI (“know me”) – including NOMI Find & Save and NOMI Insights. These digital capabilities leverage our vast amounts of data and the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to provide clients with insights into their spending and saving through our RBC Mobile app. By understanding a client’s spending behaviours and identifying money that can be set aside as savings, NOMI Find & Save has saved RBC clients more than $2.5 million since launching in October 2017. NOMI Insights is currently delivering AI-generated financial insights to more than 3 million of our mobile clients, making the RBC Mobile app the most used money management platform in Canada. To date, RBC clients have engaged with, and acted on, more than 60 million of these AI-generated financial insights.

About the RBC 2018 Post-Holiday Spending & Saving Insights Poll
These are the findings of an Ipsos poll conducted from January 2 to 5, 2018. A sample of 2,001 Canadians aged 18+ was interviewed from the Ipsos I-Say panel. Quota sampling and weighting was employed to ensure the sample’s composition reflects the adult population according to Census information. The accuracy of Ipsos online polls is measured using a Credibility Interval. In this case, the results are accurate to within ± 2.5 percentage points, 19 times out of 20, of what the results would have been had the entire population of Canadian adults been polled. Credibility intervals are wider for smaller subsets of the population.

SOURCE RBC Royal Bank