Rakuten's Christmas survey & the festive budget

As someone who tries to stick to a budget during the Christmas period, I was interested to see the results of Rakuten's recent Christmas survey from a financial perspective—this is City-Cost, after all!

You can read the report in full here, but for those watching their yen among us, these are some of the points I found interesting.

• A pretty significant 66.7% of respondents reported that price increases are impacting their Christmas budgets, up from 60.5% in 2023. Young adults in their 20s were the most likely to increase their budgets, with 15.6% expecting to spend more compared to last year. However, 50.9% of respondents were planning to maintain their 2023 spending levels.

• Despite the fact that price increases are impacting a big chunk of respondent's spending for Christmas, the most common budget range for gifts was between ¥10,000 and ¥20,000 (approximately USD 68–136), which was an increase from last year’s preference for ¥5,000 to ¥10,000.

• Not quite a "budget" thing, but 34.6% of people answered that they would prefer an activity experience over a physical gift. Might be something to keep in mind when you're shopping for people!

For context, there were 1000 respondents, both male and female, between 20 and 69 years of age.

Have you felt price increases impacting your Christmas budget? How much do you typically spend on a gift for someone in your life?