The following is another guest post from my potluck friend, Mike Mitchell.  In addition to dressing like a Dungeons & Dragons character for Halloween, Mitchell also blogs about beer over at mitchellsbeer.com.  You can also check out his past Halloween guest post too at Budgeting in the Undead Stuff. 

As the shadows lengthen on the ground and the warm green blush of summer fades into the wrinkled colors of autumn, it’s time to dust off your hockey mask and sharpen your machete: Halloween is on its way! And with it comes something even more frightening… the sticker prices on all the fun costume bits and pieces that you’d like to grab to help you get your scare on. And this year, the scare was in the air as I had to deal with an honest-to-gosh haunting!

But I’ll get back to that shortly.

Costumes Can be Costly

To make the financial matters worse, here in South Texas, October and November are also the time for the Texas Renaissance Festival.  If you’ve never been to this, then you really are missing out – it’s the largest permanent Ren Faire in the US, with Tudor-style buildings, cobble stones, a permanent jousting arena, and more shops and pubs than you can fling a dragon at…

Although you don’t have to dress up for the Ren Faire, it’s more fun when you do. Particularly since the costume dress code is a bit lax. This is a big party, so in addition to historically accurate costumes and armor (I’ve seen several people in 100% authentic full plate mail), you’ll see fairies, barbarians, D&D fantasy LARPers (if you don’t know, don’t ask) and even Steampunk Vampires (again… you might not want to know what I’m talking about). So one of the obvious ways to stretch your costume budget around here is to combine your Halloween and Ren Fest costumes.

What I Have

I already have the basics of a costume, but it needed to be updated because my old shirt and pants seemed to have shrunk a bit… yeah, that’s it. They shrank. Must be the humidity (or perhaps the ghost did it).

In years past I had bought a baldric (which is a leather strap worn over one shoulder and it drapes to the other side of your waist so you can hang a sword off of it – just google it for pics). I’ve also got the sword. Now, these items weren’t cheap: I think I paid $50-$70 for the baldric and another $75 for the sword. But I bought these almost 10 years ago and they are still solid pieces of craftsmanship. These aren’t cheap “Party City” toys, but high-quality leather and steel props that have lasted for years and will continue to last for many years more.

That’s my first bit of advice: Invest in quality “foundation pieces” for your costume. If you see a mask, hat, or robe that is a bit pricey but you know you’ll wear it more than one year, then get it. A high-quality piece will last for decades and you’ll get your money out of it in the long run.

Expanding on My Costume

So I went online and did some shopping – found some great black cargo pants in my size for only $38.  Just the sort of thing to make it easy to stash my “historically accurate” sunglasses and wallet as I walk around the Festival. Then I went shopping for a puffy shirt. Yup, a full-blown white puffy shirt like pirates wear even though I’m just going as a generic fantasy-style fighter.  The shirt gave me pause, though. It was $55. I found other shirts that were okay, but they were from Thailand and there was some concern about getting them here in time and if the fabric would shrink in the wash.

Finally, I decided to go with the online reviews for the more expensive shirt and get it. When it arrived, I was very pleased with it, despite the price tag being about $20 higher than I had originally thought it would be.

At that point, I was just under $100 for Ren Fest and Halloween (I’m not counting the cost of stuff I bought 7-10 years ago). And the costume was okay… but not perfect. It had the basics, but it lacked character. I really wanted some leather bracers or a pauldron. Bracers aren’t very much ($20-$40 depending on how fancy they are). But a pauldron is a fancy piece of shoulder armor that was originally made for protecting the right bicep and shoulder, with a strap that goes around the chest under the opposite arm pit. It’s a really cool piece… but a cheap one costs about $80.

And that’s when the haunting happened.

My Haunting

I heard it… a voice in my head. A familiar voice. A voice telling me that I had already spent $100 on a costume that I will only wear twice this year, and asking me if I “really needed to spend another $100 just to look cool for two days?”

And that’s when I recognized it! This wasn’t some ghostly voice! I knew that voice! And I knew it well! It was the voice of a certain red-haired financial blogger that we all know and love: Miss Crystal herself!

Yes, it was her voice I heard in my head, and it came back with even more: “You know we’re going to the Ren Fest on the last weekend.  You might even find those things ON SALE!”

So that’s my second bit of advice: Give in to your voice of frugality. If you’re building a high-quality costume, take your time and pace yourself. You don’t need everything right now. It’s better to invest in high-quality pieces and do it slowly over time. This will not only give you a costume for the ages, but if (like me) you hit the Ren Fest during its last weekend in late November, you can always bring along a red-haired ghost to help you hunt for a sale! 

Crystal’s Comments:  Mike told me about this “haunting” a couple of weeks ago and I couldn’t stop laughing!!!  For all of my truly frugal readers that think I am on the brink of being a spendthrift (and I get it…I am writing this from my McMansion afterall, hahaha), I counter that I am actually someone’s personal voice of frugality!!!  Really!!!  Hehehehe!  How hilarious is that?!  This is proof that one person’s splurger is another person’s tightwad.    Thanks for the post Mike!