We’re deep into Christmas shopping season, and are hurtling towards Black Friday. This year Brits have given themselves permission to spend a bit more on the festivities, according to research from Hargreaves Lansdown. The figures show people will spend an average of £611.

That’s up from £569 last year and £576 a year earlier and one in seven people will spend more than £1,000.

The good news is that this spending is within more people’s reach at the moment, because wages have been rising faster than inflation, so more household budgets are on an even keel.

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The bad news is that some of those who are spending more may feel they have no control over it. Parents, for example, will spend an average of £814 on Christmas, and more than one in 20 (7%) of them will spend more than £2,000.

There’s a risk that a lot of this spending is done either because we feel under pressure not to let people down, or because we get carried away.

It’s easy to let Christmas creep set in too, where we buy more with every passing year. So it’s worth taking seven steps to avoid getting carried away with your Christmas shopping.

More than one in 10 people (11%) have no idea what they’ll spend on Christmas, and this is likely to owe much to the fact that they’ve just started spending with no real plan. The only way to stay on track is to know what you have to spend in the first place.

It’s not exactly a list of who has been naughty or nice, but it should be a list of everyone you absolutely need to buy for, and every extra you need to pick up. Put it in priority order, and then work your way through it, allocating your budget to each item.

When you run out of budget, you can’t buy anything any further down the list unless you cut back elsewhere.

If you know there’s a risk you’ll overspend, make time once a week between now and Christmas to go back to your budget and make sure you’re on track.

If you’re searching for inspiration on a shopping trip you’re more likely to go astray. This goes double for Black Friday, where you need a list and the discipline to stick to it, when you’re tempted to go off piste.

If you’ve somehow ended up in a position where you or your family expect to spend hundreds of pounds on a beauty advent calendar, or any other expensive tradition, take a step back and ask if it’s going to ruin Christmas to go without.

That way you’ll have an extra payday to cover costs, you can pick presents up in the post-Christmas sales, and you could even regift things.

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