Cleveland Ranks Dead Last For Holiday Spending

CLEVELAND — Clevelanders should be prepared to spend very, very little on the holidays. Personal finance website WalletHub ranked Northeast Ohio at the bottom of its list of U.S. cities for recommended holiday spending totals.

Cleveland finished 570th out of...570 cities. Clevelanders should spend a paltry $64 this season, according to WalletHub. It's the thought that counts though, right?

"We calculated the maximum holiday budget for each city using the population's income, age, debt to income ratio, monthly income to monthly expenses ratio and savings to monthly expenses ratio," said WalletHub's Diana Polk.

Parma actually ranked 122 out of 570. Residents there were told they could budget about $962 for the holidays. Columbus was the second most highly ranked Ohio city, with recommended holiday spending of $930.

"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," officials said in releasing the findings on Tuesday.

Before anyone assumes the meager $64 recommendation was a Rust Belt bias played out in stats, the city with the second lowest spend total was Miami, Florida. Residents of that coastal, LeBron-stealing town were told to spend just $81 this year.

New Haven, Connecticut; Springfield, Massachusetts; and Glendale, California rounded out the bottom five for holiday spending in 2018.

"The total amount represents the average maximum holiday budget," Polk told Patch. "Seeing as we considered people's income as well as all types of expenses, the actual budgets should be close to our numbers, but we cannot estimate how much people will actually spend."

Where should you go for the holidays? Flower Mound, Texas, apparently. Residents there can spend $2,761,which is more than any other city in the nation. Flower Mound was followed by Sunyvale, California which had a budget of $2,575 and San Ramon, California with a budget of $2,036.

As our counterparts in Miami said, to the good folks at WalletHub, sorry we won't be able to get you anything this year. It's evidently not in our budget.

See where other cities rank here.

(For more news like this, find your local Patch here. If you have an iPhone, click here to get the free Patch iPhone app; download the free Patch Android app here. And like Patch on Facebook!)

Photo from Shutterstock