Simple Costume Ideas for Halloween

If you have a Halloween party coming up and are at a loss for a costume, Living on the Cheap offers 101+ Cheap and Easy Halloween Costumes you can assemble using thrift-store finds and a little creativity. You can’t go wrong with scary classics such as ghost, vampire and mummy, or you can opt for instantly recognizable pop culture characters such as a Minion or Ghostbuster. Whatever the costume, shopping at a thrift supplied by donations to ClothingDonations.org helps fund essential veterans programs nationwide.

Thrift Your Look for Halloween

Thrift stores are a “goldmine” for Halloween costumes, the Gurl blog says. Many are a treasure trove of clothing from bygone eras, meaning that finding your inner flower child or going grunge won’t cost a fortune. Better still, you can amp up the gore by smearing those finds with fake blood, and never worry about ruining something you’ll want to wear again! The blog suggests 15 thriftastically creative costume ideas for women, including Carrie, Disco Diva and Eleven from Stranger Things.

Build a Thrifty Halloween Costume

For the do-it-yourselfer, there is no better place to source a Halloween costume than the local thrift store, says Parade magazine. Combine clothing you already have with thrifted items such as a wig and tiara to transform your toddler into a princess, it says. Or buy a lightly-used puffy shirt at the thrift, add a bandana, eyepatch and toy sword, and (poof!) you’re a pirate. Goodwill Industries even offers a complete costume generator that can help build a weird, wild or scary costume from a variety of thrift-store finds.

Halloween costume inspiration

For Halloween costume inspiration, check out Netflix or your TV programming guide for celebrity ideas. With some large frame glasses, your daughter can look like an old-school Taylor Swift. With Pokémon Go all the rage, it should be easy to create some fantasy creatures for your youngsters to wear.  For “Duck Dynasty” look-alikes, you just need some dark yarn for beards.

Shop vintage for Halloween loot

Many young women and parents haunt vintage shops for Halloween loot. You can find plenty of ideas at these shops for 1920s flapper costumes, for example, or to represent book and movie characters from “Gone with the Wind, ” “The Wizard of Oz” or early TV shows such as “I Love Lucy.” You and a friend could find all of the right fashion for a Lucy and Ethel pairing or Lucy and Ricky for a couple.