The stores are festooned with Christmas decorations, holiday music is playing, and if you don't plan ahead, you're likely to fall into the annual spending trap. If you're like many, every year you tell yourself to resist busting your budget on a shopping spree. And then you get caught up in the holiday spirit and shopping rush.

Here are some tips to rein in that good cheer before it turns into a post-holiday credit hangover.

Know your current credit balances: You'll never pay down your current balances if you keep adding to them. Take the credit card bills that just arrived and make a list of the balances, finance rates and minimum monthly payment. It may look affordable now, but those balances can overwhelm your finances in the long run.

If you charge just $2,000 and have a finance charge of 19.8 percent, pay a $40 annual fee for your card and then make only the required minimum monthly payments, it could take you as long as 31 years to pay off the balance. That's digging yourself a very deep hole.

Choose and use one credit card: Use the one with the best terms and points or cash-back rewards. Don't fool yourself into thinking that having multiple cards with lower balances is the way to handle holiday spending. Go to www.CreditCards.com and choose among cards with the best deals for your situation.

Check card balances online weekly: It's easy to forget just how much you spent on a busy Saturday afternoon. So set up your card with secure online access at the card provider website. Then remember to check it regularly. That will reveal any unauthorized use of your card as well as your outstanding balance.

Don't add co-signers or authorized users: This is just asking for trouble. If you're having a tough time managing your spending, why do you think your adult child, teen or spendthrift spouse will do any better? You're only exposing your own credit to their mistakes.

If a young person needs a credit card, introduce them to a secured card — one with a credit limit equal to the balance they put in a savings account with the issuing bank. Urge them to spend carefully, pay in full and on time every month, and soon they will start building their own good credit report. Find a secured card at Bankrate.com.

Don't fool yourself: Make a holiday vow to pay off all credit card balances when the bill arrives in January. Yes, that's a stretch. But so is the alternative of being buried in finance charges. As a last resort, take your credit card out of your wallet and use your debit card. That way, you can avoid the bills entirely in January.

None of this should come as a surprise to you. But as an incentive, here's the other side of the debt story:

If you took that same $2,000 and instead invested it in a stock market S&P 500 index fund in an IRA over the next 31 years, and if the market performed, on average, the same way it has in the past 31 years (a total 10 percent average annual return, with dividends reinvested, according to Morningstar), then instead of paying a ton of interest, you'd have a retirement account worth nearly $40,000.

And if you did that every year for the next 31 years, and the same factors applied, you'd have well over $360,000 in your retirement account.

Saving and investing, instead of spending and debt, give you better rewards than points or miles. And that's The Savage Truth.

Terry Savage is a registered investment adviser and the author of four best-selling books, including “The Savage Truth on Money.” She responds to questions on her blog at TerrySavage.com.