How I’m Keeping My Candy Budget Down (and Avoiding Waste) This Halloween

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Halloween means buying candy, right? Keep reading to learn how one writer is coping with the extra expense in a unique way. 

Around nine out of 10 of Americans buy candy for Halloween. And among those who partake in this festive holiday, the average household spent $29.51 last year. While that’s not a huge sum of money out of your checking account, it does mean this season comes with added costs.

We tend to get a lot of trick-or-treaters because our neighborhood is known for amazing decorations and generous households who hand out good candy, so I’ve charged much more than that on my credit cards in the past. But in recent years, I accidentally stumbled onto a solution that lets me essentially spend nothing on candy while avoiding waste.

Here’s how we dropped our candy budget

We ended up eliminating our spending on candy entirely by accident. See, we were looking for fun activities to do for our children during halloween and we discovered that a huge number of churches and community organizations hold trunk-or-treat events in the weeks leading up to Halloween.

Most often, these are free events that the organizations invite members of the entire community to in order to interact with the public and promote their group. In some limited cases, you’re asked to bring something like a can of food for donation.

My kids had an absolute blast going trick or treating at the trunk-or-treat events, especially since many places had games and activities for them to do as well as collecting candy. And they also made an absolute haul on the candy they collected — especially at one trunk-or-treat last year. We went at the end of the night, and people just dumped what was left in their bowls into our baskets.

Of course, we don’t want our kids to actually eat all this candy (particularly our young toddler, who has especially discovered a love of trick-or-treating this year), so we had to find something to do with it. Our solution was to hand it out on Halloween to all of the kids that come to our neighborhood.

So in the end, my children get to have the fun of going to these events, and since we end up with way more candy than we can even hand out on the big night, they still get to keep some. And we don’t have to buy even more candy at the store.

How to make your own Halloween candy more affordable

If you want to save on your own candy budget, going to trunk-or-treat events is a great way to do it. This also helps make the holiday a more festive one for kids. Our Halloween season now stretches out for a week or longer as we attend all of these different events, so it’s become a major holiday my kids look forward to every year.

We’ve been easily able to find trunk-or-treat events by checking Facebook as well as local newspapers and community websites to find which places are hosting them. We just make a list of them and have even checked out several in one day. So check your own community to see if you can find them in your area so you can slash your own candy budget while making the Halloween holiday more memorable for your loved ones.

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