Smart spending advice is all around, and deals abound in all categories of spending. Sometimes it can be a quick tip that provides the "ah-hah!" moment - the figurative light bulb goes on and "ka-ching," money stays in your pocket.

Here's a list of tips and insights, from holiday spending to phone services.

Holiday regrets

How's that holiday spending hangover? Long after the gift wrap found its way to the landfill, people had regrets about how they spent their money and time over the holidays, according to a post-holiday survey. I helped develop the survey with personal finance speaker Matt Bell of MoneyPurposeJoy. com and market research firm Synovate.

About 30 percent of people said they wished they had spent less money on gifts during the holidays, and 28 percent wished they spent less time shopping in stores. Meanwhile, 54 percent of people regretted not spending more time with family and friends. If you want to know what's important to you, look at your datebook and your checkbook. Entries in each reveal your priorities.

Gift-giving

To spend less on gifts, Bell suggests now is the perfect time to take a cue from Old St. Nick by making a list and checking it twice. Make a list of not only holiday gifts but also presents for birthdays, anniversaries and other occasions. Planning often means you'll end up spending less.

Planning ahead also means you'll probably come up with better gifts, according to researchers in a study published in the Journal of Consumer Research. Research suggests that as a gift-giving deadline approaches, our perspective shifts from gifts with positive outcomes - something that will thrill the recipient - to gifts that will simply help us avoid a fight. The findings came from Cassie Theriault of Stanford University, Jennifer Aaker of the University of California, Berkeley, and Ginger Pennington of the University of Chicago.

The researchers also found that consumers on a tight deadline to plan a vacation, for example, will pay an average of $178 more when presented with negative pitches, such as "Don't get stuck at home!" and "Don't get ripped off," than they would pay for vacations with positive pitches, such as "Give yourself a memorable vacation!" and "Get the best deal!"

Meanwhile, consumers with longer time horizons for the trip would pay more - an average of $165 - when presented with positive pitches.

Phone

To reduce phone spending, consider buying the absolute cheapest land-line phone service, sometimes as low as $5 a month, along with one add-on service, call forwarding, says the nonprofit Telecommunications Research and Action Center. Set up your land line to forward incoming calls to your cell phone, assuming you have plenty of wireless minutes to spare. Make outbound calls with the cell phone. This is an alternative to going completely wireless, giving you a land-line backup.

Business line alternative

If you pay for a second phone line to have a different number for your home business, consider using Google's GrandCentral service, www.grandcentral.com. GrandCentral gives you a free number - you can choose from many area codes - and you tell GrandCentral which phone that number should ring.

For example, if you work at home alone during the day, tell GrandCentral to route business calls to your home land-line phone. At night, when other family members are home, or if you're traveling, tell GrandCentral to send calls to your cell phone. Callers won't know the difference. It can even ring multiple phones at the same time.

This is an alternative to having all business calls go to a cell phone, where you use up minutes and can suffer poor audio quality. GrandCentral is in the "beta" testing phase and said you have to be invited to use the service, but I signed up and was quickly invited. Others have reported the same experience.

If it works for you, you can cancel that business phone line and save money.

Hungry to spend

Exposure to something that whets the appetite, such as a picture of a dessert, can make a person more impulsive with unrelated purchases, finds a study from the Journal of Consumer Research.

For example, the study reveals that the aroma of chocolate chip cookies can prompt women on a tight budget to splurge on a new item of clothing, researcher Xiuping Li of the National University of Singapore found.

The lesson: Know thyself. Whether we like it or not, we can be tricked into buying.

yourmoney@tribune.com

Gregory Karp is a personal finance writer for The Morning Call, a Tribune Co. newspaper in Allentown, Pa.