Black Friday and the festive season are both lining up for your year-end bonus. Before they get to it, decide what you want that money to do.
A bonus is about to land, and the discount emails are already waiting for it.
Black Friday promotions are filling inboxes and social feeds, and the festive season is only weeks away. If you’re expecting a year-end bonus, it’s remarkably easy to start spending it before it has even reached your bank account.
Your salary arrives with its responsibilities already attached: the bond, school fees, debit orders, the everyday cost of living. A bonus feels different. It seems to come with fewer instructions, and what we do with it often shows whether our spending matches what we say we value.
Behavioural economists have a name for this. Mental accounting describes how we sort money into categories depending on where it came from and what we think it’s for. Salary is for obligations. A refund, a gift or a bonus feels like extra, even though every rand is worth exactly the same. The Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis notes that windfalls tend to be spent more freely than regular income simply because of how we label them. The money is the same; we’ve just filed it somewhere else in our heads.
It doesn’t take long for “bonus” to turn into “reward”. I’ve worked hard. It’s been a tough year. I deserve this. And perhaps you do. I certainly don’t believe every extra rand should disappear into an investment. Money should bring some joy into your life, and there should be room for celebration, generosity and fun.
But before you decide what you deserve to buy, try a different question: what do you want this money to do for you?
You might want to pay down debt, put next year’s school fees aside, rebuild your emergency fund or invest for the future. You might want an experience with your family, or something you’ve wanted and been planning towards for a while. There’s no single right answer. What matters is that you decide, rather than letting the money drift. With everyday costs still squeezing household budgets, a bonus often has more work to do than it did a year ago, and that makes the pause before you spend it all the more important.
Black Friday and festive campaigns add another layer. Discounts, countdown clocks and limited offers are built to create urgency, and when you already feel you’ve earned a treat, it takes very little to tip you into a purchase you haven’t really thought through. Discovery Bank and Visa’s SpendTrend26 report, which analysed 2.6 billion credit-card transactions across 12 million cards, found that Black Friday lifts spending by 57% and has grown into a month-long spending cycle. In its survey of credit-card holders earning more than R100,000 a year, payday, discounts and the feeling of having earned a reward were the leading triggers for treats.
Research from the Yale School of Management describes what it calls “shopping momentum”: once we’ve made one purchase, the next comes more easily. It also shows how readily we overlook opportunity cost – everything else that same money could have done.
If you spend R20,000 on something because it’s 40% off, R20,000 has still left your account. The discount tells you about the price. It can’t tell you what the purchase is worth to you, or what it will add to your life.
A bonus may be new money, but we bring our old habits to it – the default behaviours we’ve repeated so often that they run almost on autopilot. Some of those habits move us towards the life we want. Others quietly pull us away from it.
I’ve seen how earning more can simply give an old habit more room to grow. One client’s income rose dramatically as his career took off, and as the family’s wealth grew, so did their spending: investment properties, luxury cars, a holiday home and increasingly expensive holidays. Looking back, he said: “We did a lot of spending, but not a lot of thinking about how we wanted our future lives to look.”
Their income had changed far faster than the way they thought about money. Only when they stopped and began planning deliberately did they start asking what they actually wanted their wealth to do for their lives.
A bonus offers a smaller version of that moment. It’s a chance to notice whether you’re spending with intent, or simply repeating what you always do when there’s a little more in the account. Before you decide how to use it, look at the habit sitting underneath the decision.
December is very good at adding. More gifts, more celebrations, more travel and entertaining, more commitments and more expectations. But it’s also a good month to edit. Most of us are far better at adding things to our lives than at stopping to ask whether they still deserve a place there.
Generosity doesn’t always have to cost money; sometimes it means giving more of your time. Letting go of one expense, tradition or expectation can free up room for something that matters more to you now. You can still enjoy every bit of the festive season. You’ll simply be choosing where your time, energy and money go, instead of finding out in January.
We often talk about our values as though knowing them is enough. It’s in our choices that they really show up, and few choices test them as clearly as what we do with money that seems to have no instructions attached.
So before you spend your bonus, ask yourself what you’d like it to have done for you by the time January comes around. You may find there are things you’re quite happy not to spend on at all. Some of your money habits will still be serving you well; others may no longer belong in the life you’re trying to build. Either way, make those decisions now, before the festive season starts making them for you.
By Kim Potgieter, CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER® professional and Managing Director of Chartered Wealth Solutions
About the author
Kim Potgieter is an author, speaker, and financial planner. She is the Managing Director at Chartered Wealth Solutions, where she helps clients align their money with purpose and guides them through the second chapter of their lives. She is the author of “Retirement – Get More Meaning for Your Money” (2015) and “Midlife Money Makeover” (2021). Kim is a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER® Professional, Registered Financial Life Planner, ICF Professional Coach, Dare to Lead™ Facilitator, and New Money Story® Mentor Coach. She holds degrees in Industrial and Clinical Psychology.
