I will take the train home, because it is more convenient than taking a plane to my hometown. Together with the cost of a round-trip train ticket home, which is about 1,000 yuan, I plan to spend 2,500 yuan ($365) during the Spring Festival this year. This sum is less than the amount I spent last year. Because of the financial crisis, our bank will probably reduce our salaries, so I will spend a frugal Spring Festival this year.

We are seeing the impact of the financial crisis. Our bonuses for December were only 60 percent of what they were in the previous months. Although the bank was profitable in 2008, the management thinks we should be aware of the possible effects of the crisis, so we are prepared to live frugal lifestyles.

Buying Clothes, Fireworks and Ox-Shaped Decorations

Bai Linqi, 54, a retired car driver　in Beijing

For the Spring Festival this year I plan to spend more than 5,000 yuan ($731) on shopping. I will buy clothes, because according to Chinese tradition, people wear new clothes for a new look in the new year. I will buy food for our family reunion dinner and entertaining guests. My budget list also includes fireworks, because it is a tradition to let off fireworks during the Spring Festival to drive away evil spirits. Ox-shaped decorations are also on my shopping list to celebrate the year of the ox. The amount of money I'll spend on shopping this year will be the same as last year.

My wife has many friends in other parts of the country. Her friends in Inner Mongolia and Beihai, Guangxi, have invited us to visit them during the Spring Festival. So after the family reunion on Lunar New Year's Eve, we may fly to Inner Mongolia or Beihai. The air tickets will cost about 5,000 yuan. We may not buy any souvenirs when we travel, but we plan to spend another 2,000-3,000 yuan ($293-439) for buying presents for our friends and paying dinners with them.

If we can't get plane tickets, we will go to the temple fairs in Beijing where we can enjoy folk art performances and taste the local delicacies of Beijing.

Hot Potato or Cold Potato?

Guo Zhanwen, 50, a farmer in Weizigou Village, Weichang County, Hebei Province

Having lived by farming all my life, I never expected that my life someday could be impacted by the so-called financial crisis. But it has really happened.

For years, my wife and I have planted over 30 mu (2 hectares) of land, mostly potatoes and a few corn and rice plants. And when the Spring Festival approaches every year, a lot of wholesalers from Beijing and Shijiazhuang (provincial capital of Hebei) come to my village to purchase potatoes. We can sell several thousand kilograms of potatoes at an average price of 0.2 yuan every year. That makes up nearly 80 percent of the family income. But unfortunately, we have not sold any so far this year. The wholesalers are just not coming.

But thankfully living in the village does not cost too much, so we can still make ends meet. Moreover, we have been used to living hand-to-mouth.

As we did in the past, we have prepared a lot of stuff for the Spring Festival, including firecrackers, New Year paintings and poetic couplets, as well as things to eat and drink. It's, after all, the most important festival of the whole year. Besides this, the children are coming back from cities to celebrate the festival. I want them to have a good time at home.

My current biggest concern is how to figure out a way to sell the potatoes before they rot by next autumn. Every year we grind some potatoes into starch and then make them into potato noodles. We carted the potato noodles to neighboring villages for sale. They sold quite good even at much higher prices than whole potatoes. But since the process was very complicated and tiring, we can't make too many.

Save for the Future

Michael Standaert, 35, a correspondent with the San Francisco Chronicle and the Bureau of National Affairs living in China

We're probably not going to buy much during the Spring Festival other than food or meals at restaurants. Over Christmas we were back in the United States and did buy many things that we can't get here or that we could find on sale-mainly clothing, some food and things like shampoos and soaps. I think we actually spent more money this year than we did last year. I bought new luggage and a video camera. We tried to find the cheapest ticket we could back to the United States, but that's what we usually do anyway. We're not traveling during the Spring Festival, but my wife's father and brother will be coming over from Taiwan now that there are direct flights.

We really haven't been affected much by the financial crisis. We're young professionals in the middle of careers that aren't affected that much (journalism and interpreting), don't have investments that have been eaten up by the stock markets and don't have a mortgage. We'll likely give a little more than enough in the red envelopes this year to cover the flight costs of my wife's father and brother. I don't see any effect on how much we spend at restaurants or on cooking at home.

What the financial crisis has done though is made us more aware of what we need to do for our future, so we've started to think more about how we're going to save money, pay off student loans and credit cards, and talk about what kind of investments we might choose in the future. We'll probably stay in China one or two more years and then move to Canada so my wife can get a PhD, but this doesn't have anything to do with the global economy as much as it does with our personal goals. The planned move though is also making us think more about how much we need to save beforehand. We'll both continue to freelance, and expect our work to be steady and stable and probably better than last year.