Friday, November 7, 2008

How to Have a Birthday Party for Under $100


Tip #25 - How to Have a Birthday Party for Under $100. It's easy to have a birthday party without spending a lot of money. First thing is to have it at home. This way you are not spending any money to rent a room or paying an outrageous per person entertainment fee. Next thing is to come up with food. You can have lunch if you wish. It doesn't have to be expensive. It can be pizza, sandwiches, chicken nuggets, etc. To make it even cheaper, have it after lunch and just serve dessert and cake. Next you want to come up with activities for the kids. Girls love crafts and they are fairly cheap to do. Depending on the age, you can do beading, painting t-shirts or tote bags, making princess crowns, etc. Boys can do crafts if they are young. They can make dinosaur dioramas or policeman hats. If they are a bit older, you might want to skip crafts unless you know your son and friends are into making things. Next you want to do a game of some sort. There are the typical musical chairs, hot potato, etc. Or you can make a treasure hunt, carnival games, bingo or whatever matches the theme of the party. Two or three games are usually fun to play at a party. Next is cake and ice cream. Final is open presents if you wish and then down time - can read a story until kids are picked up. Hand out goody bags. All of that should be well under $100.

In Real Life (IRL) - My daughter's 7th birthday party is tomorrow. She is having a "mock" sleepover. Which means 10 girls are coming over at 5 PM and are going home at 9 PM. I will go through the costs and point out where it could have been even cheaper. We sent out invitations to 11 girls. Cost was $1.00 for the invitations and $4.50 for the stamps. Even cheaper would have been to call the girls or hand out the invitations personally. At 5:oo all of the girls are showing up. My husband will pick up pizza at 5:15 and be back by 5:30. Cost of pizza is $45. We could have done this cheaper. I could have made pizza - much more work and I have a baby at home. I could have gotten frozen pizza - not as good. We love this NY pizza place where we're getting the pizza so it's worth it to us. Paper goods were $4 for plates and cups. We had the silverware and tablecloth. We bought plain colors to keep cost down. After the pizza, we are doing the craft. A neighborhood girl is coming over to help. We are going to pay her $10 to help us. The craft is making lip gloss. We spent $3 for containers. $2 for petroleum jelly, $1 for
Jell-O. After the craft we are polishing nails. We bought nail polish and glitter set for $3.50 at a yard sale. Next is games. We are playing hot pillow - prize cost $1. And we are playing bingo. Prize is $1. Then is Make Your Own Sundaes - Cost of ingredients is $15. Cupcakes were made from a mix for a cost of about $2. Open presents is free. Goody bags cost $1 each and will be filled with lip gloss, nail polish, note pads, pen, and nail file. Everything was bought throughout the year on clearance. Thank you notes were 50 cents and another $4.10 to mail. Total cost of party is about $107.50. So I went over the $100. This is IRL after all. But it easily could be cut down by cutting out hiring the neighbor, doing the food from scratch or having fewer sundae ingredients. Also, we will probably have leftover items that we can use.

1 comment:

Meredith said...

I love this! What great advice. Thank you for sharing your link!