WASHINGTON, Nov. 25 (Xinhua) -- People in 13 U.S. cities have an average shopping budget of over 2,000 U.S. dollars for this holiday season, while in nine cites, the average budget is less than 200 dollars, according to a recent survey.
The WalletHub, which used date from the National Retail Federation, compared 570 U.S. cities to determine the maximum shoppers can comfortably afford to spend.
"At a high level, our algorithm considers a consumer to be in a comfortable financial position to engage in holiday spending if they have: enough emergency savings to cover at least six months of expenses and a debt-to-income ratio smaller than 22 percent for a renter or 43 percent for a homeowner," the CNBC cited the survey as saying.
Flower Mound in Texas, Sunnyvale in California and Naperville in Illinois are the three U.S. cities where people are expected to spend the most, with an average holiday budget of 2,761 dollars, 2,575 dollars and 2,528 dollars respectively.
The three U.S. cities that ranked at the bottom of the list are New Haven in Connecticut, Miami in Florida and Cleveland in Ohio, with an average holiday budget of 115 dollars, 81 dollars and 64 collars respectively.
The National Retail Federation had predicted earlier that U.S. consumers will spend an average of 1,007 dollars during holiday season this year, up 4.1 percent from last year.
The holiday shopping season, which starts with a five-day stretch that includes Thanksgiving Day, Black Friday and Cyber Monday, generally runs to early January.
Figures from market research firm eMarketer put overall U.S. retail sales for this holiday season at 1 trillion, with 12 percent coming from online sales.
