Being “that” Halloween house doesn’t have to scare your savings

By Deborah Smith

Maybe you’re looking for an opportunity to connect with your older kids or perhaps gain “aura points” with your young ones, you might enjoy contributing to your community, or maybe you just like scaring people—whatever the reason—you can engage in the eerie season without causing financial nightmares. 

My family started becoming that house almost 20 years ago. The last couple of years that has meant preparing for over 500 kids to visit our house on Halloween night. By mimicking sound investment strategies over the years, we’ve enjoyed being a neighborhood attraction without being snared by overspending.

We started with one specific anchor item, Sabastian the giant spider. We added a lot of webbing, some dry ice and created cardboard cutout gravestones. With little effort we had a spooky graveyard for under $100. Animatronics were still a novelty at that time and while tempted, we could not afford full price. We established a plan and our patience paid off. During the day after Halloween sales, we picked up a few more items for half-price or less.

Since then, we’ve established a cycle of maintain, purge and splurge. During the maintain years we have a very small budget and focus on crafting opportunities or replacement parts. In the purge years we sell our older items, which allow us to recoup some of our original spend. We track how much we’ve recouped as it helps to fund the following splurge year, when we rebalance our display. In our best year, 60% of our splurge budget was from recouping cost.

Ok, technically I just made-up “horror-cycling.” However, some of our best opportunities for minimizing fees (i.e. the cost of our decorations) come from recycling thrift store buys or reusing normal items as Halloween decorations. Minimizing costs through horror-cycling also built lasting memories, and helped our kids learn how to use power tools. At age 10, our son was using a jigsaw (under supervision of course) and by 12 years old our daughter had learned about splicing and soldering wires.

Horror-cycling doesn’t have to be horrifically complicated. One year we set up our tent in the front yard, put a strobe inside and added some skeletons on lawn chairs to create a spooky campsite. We’ve repainted the faces of old dolls we picked up at thrift stores and made glowing egg sacks out of milk jugs. Our more ambitious projects include a ghostly fountain, turning trashed wood pallets into perimeter fencing, and simulating a car accident on our front lawn (complete with toxic spill!).

Being able to minimize the cost involved through horror-cycling increased our quality family time together, while teaching problem solving. The net returns for our family are priceless.

Many of our current decorations carry an equivalent annualized cost (EAC) of about $20. We have a zombie figure that comes in the lowest at $3.16 and Sabastian sits at $4.40. Most of the ones we’ve sold were closer to the $15-20 range at the point we sold them. We consider the amount recouped as part of our return on investment. When including thrifted items, we’ve actually had purge years reflect a modest net profit.

To achieve these kinds of values, maintenance matters most and will help protect against loss. For example, we never leave batteries in our decorations when storing them for the next year, and we’ve found using fog cleaner keeps fog machines working for multi-year use. We reuse the original boxes for storage and keep the instructions. The box and instructions help when needing to order replacement parts and allow us to carefully repack animatronics for the following year. We’ve also learned that buying quality matters. If the quality isn’t there, we don’t buy. 

Maximizing ROI means our attraction goes up Halloween day and everything is back in the garage before we head to bed that night. The longer our ghouls are exposed to the elements, the shorter the time they will haunt. To squeeze out a bit more value when an animatronic has moved on to eternal rest (i.e. broken beyond repair), we add a horror-cycled mask or clothes and reimagine that figure into the background.

This year, Sabastian the spider will be back again terrorizing and entertaining the neighborhood. Although our Halloween is hectic, it’s been an investment in our family and community that’s paid lasting dividends. My favorite quote came from a teen vampire last year who said, “I’ve been coming to your neighborhood since I was a kid to see your house. It’s my favorite!” Truly the epitome of successful Halloween investing.