With 54% of merchants expecting increased holiday spending in 2020 despite the COVID-19 pandemic, the personal-finance website WalletHub today released its 2020 Holiday Budgets by City report, as well as accompanying videos, along with its free tool that calculates personalized holiday budgets for all WalletHub members between now and Dec. 25.
To help consumers avoid post-holiday regret, WalletHub used several key metrics, such as income, age and savings-to-monthly expenses ratio, to estimate the maximum spending amounts for consumers in each of 570 U.S. cities.
The following are some highlights from the report:| Cities with the Biggest Holiday Budgets | |
| 1. Palo Alto, CA ($3,056) | 11. Fremont, CA ($2,684) |
| 2. Flower Mound, TX ($2,973) | 12. Santa Clara, CA ($2,673) |
| 3. Naperville, IL ($2,867) | 13. Milpitas, CA ($2,610) |
| 4. Sunnyvale, CA ($2,829) | 14. Centreville, VA ($2,502) |
| 5. Newton, MA ($2,768) | 15. League City, TX ($2,501) |
| 6. The Woodlands, TX ($2,729) | 16. Bellevue, WA ($2,488) |
| 7. Sugar Land, TX ($2,728) | 17. Mount Pleasant, SC ($2,452) |
| 8. San Mateo, CA ($2,722) | 18. Ellicott City, MD ($2,430) |
| 9. Mountain View, CA ($2,704) | 19. Cambridge, MA ($2,414) |
| 10. Weston, FL ($2,698) | 20. Carmel, IN ($2,408) |
Key Stats
- Cambridge, Massachusetts, has the lowest debt-to-income ratio, 16.16 percent, which is 4.1 times lower than in Hesperia, California, the city with the highest at 65.80 percent.
- Palo Alto, California, has the lowest expenses-to-income ratio, 57.90 percent, which is 1.7 times lower than in Albany, Georgia, the city with the highest at 99.21 percent.
- Hoover, Alabama, has the highest savings-to-monthly expenses ratio, 203.78 percent, which is 2.2 times higher than in Hawthorne, California, the city with the lowest at 93.84 percent.
