I went to college in New York City, which meant that beyond the dorm room and frat house festivities, Halloween was a raucous celebration with the entire island of Manhattan serving as a playground. The holiday included the famed Halloween parade, the bars that took fake IDs and the streets of Greenwich Village teeming with wild and crazy costumes.
To prepare for such epic revelry, discussions on what to wear would commence weeks in advance. Friends would run out to the costume shops and specialty stores to pick up masks, fake blood and impossibly inappropriate nurses outfits as the big day drew nearer. Wanting to be fabulously clever and cool in my own Halloween attire, I made a trip to one such store myself. What I saw there was far more frightening than any costume I can recall. The prices!
An adult Cleopatra costume was $59.99. The retailers were charging $60 for what you could wear to a classic college “toga party” for free. Needless to say, I walked out empty handed and handcrafted my own costume from markers, construction paper and items I found lingering at the back of my closet.
As the years dragged on, my enthusiasm for the holiday progressively waned. Now I celebrate by going to the farmers market, picking up some delicious seasonal ingredients and cooking an autumn meal as I stream Hocus Pocus on Netflix. It’s not because I don’t appreciate a good party, but because I’m a fully grown adult and spending sixty bucks on a children’s holiday seems even more ludicrous than it did in my college years.
The National Retail Federation projects that the average person will spend $77.52 on Halloween this year (a $2 increase from last year); 18 to 24 year olds will top the spending at an average of $87. That’s right, adults without children are spending more than anyone on a holiday where you dress up, fantasize and ask for candy.
My concern here isn’t how people get their kicks. After all, I’m a professional actress and I dress up and pretend to be someone else for a living. What irks me is the considerable spending on something so trivial by a group that is notoriously mired in financial struggle.
The same age group that plans to spend a non-essential $87 on Halloween this year has 75 percent of its members reporting that they spend more than they earn every month in a survey by Rent.com. That survey goes on to reveal that more than 20 percent of those 18 to 24 year olds overspend their income by more than $100 each month. In that context, $87 is a hugely significant number.
Between astronomical student loan debt and credit card reliance making up losses between paydays, perhaps it’s time for young adults to outgrow some of their non-essential spending patterns.
The numbers on Halloween spending exemplify where those cutbacks are possible. The problem is, many young adults aren’t looking at the numbers, they’re simply spending in alignment with a cycle of habits and traditions they’ve come to know and adopt, regardless of whether or not they can realistically afford them once when they become responsible for funding the expenses themselves.
I was on tour a few years back with a co-worker who consistently complained about how “broke” she was. Being a low earner myself, I empathized with her situation, until the day she got on the tour bus with an entire stock of freshly purchased seasonal decorations. I’m talking stickers of bats and pumpkins to put on the window by her bus seat, superfluous bags of candy and all kinds of random accessories like orange socks with prints of candy corn. If I had to guesstimate, I’d say she probably spent around $50 on purely decorative items that wound up in the trash a month later.
Now if those things made her happy for 30 days, they weren’t entirely useless, but when that seemingly small $50 expense is compounded by all the holiday decorations throughout the year and high interest credit card debt, they become harder to justify. Wouldn’t the relief of a debt free existence provide much more lasting happiness?
Perhaps all of us can benefit from taking a step back from our purchase patterns, especially at this time of year, when seasonal spending goes into overdrive, and assess our spending from a big picture perspective. Are there any unnecessary habits and routine expenses we can grow out of, like one-time wear Halloween costumes, for the sake of a longer lasting happiness?
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