YNAB – Planning A Kids Birthday Party on a Budget

Growing up my mom always threw amazing birthday parties for my brother and me. They were always themed. They were always memorable. AND she always did it on a shoestring! I have taken that tradition and attempted to carry it on for my daughters. I think every mother wants her kids to feel celebrated on their birthday, but most of us don’t have tons of cash to drop for the occasion!

I want to share with you how we do wonderful and exciting birthdays for cheap. I mean really cheap. My kids’ party budget is $25. I know one time I overspent and it cost closer to $50, but that is still pretty inexpensive! As I am writing this my oldest daughter is 6, my second daughter recently turned 5, and my littlest one is just 15 months. That means we have celebrated 12 kid birthdays so far! All of them have been on a low budget. I want to share some of my tips and tricks with you for making it low cost while maintaining your sanity!

First of all, start with the “why” behind celebrating a birthday. I remember birthdays with my firstborn – I wanted to have everyone over to celebrate her first birthday and I assumed all our family and friends wanted to celebrate her as much as I did! We had a little party (still on a budget) and she was hugely overwhelmed. When she turned 2 we did it again with lots of friends and family. She was overwhelmed once again. Having all the neighbors and family over caused me stress because, at the time, I also had a baby and my house was a mess. I began to not enjoy this whole birthday thing. I started to consider the fact that we wanted to have more children and that meant lots of birthdays. The reason I didn’t enjoy it was because my daughter wasn’t enjoying it either! The party felt like it was more about me entertaining other adults, and she was overwhelmed by everyone, and the party wasn’t geared toward her.

The next year we celebrated differently. We made it about her. She was a disaster. She acted like a spoiled princess and was clearly stressed out. We realized that we had let the pendulum swing too far in the opposite direction. We decided on the following principles for future birthdays in our family:

1. Birthdays needed to be a celebration of God. God created this incredible human! God was faithful for the past year of life! The growth of my child is from the Lord and so He should be celebrated rather than the child. We put God back in the center and removed our child and she was much happier the following year.
2. Birthday parties need to be enjoyable for the kid with the birthday. Rather than cater to the expectations of society, our friends and family, and even ourselves we wanted to consider what would be enjoyable for the child. For us that meant scaling back on the number of people when they were little by switching to “friends only” parties once they turned 4. Before age 4, we follow this simple formula: cake, hokey-pokey, dollar store balloons, done!

My next tip is to actually set out parameters for your budget. Consider how many children you have (or plan to have) and do some simple math. We wanted to set aside about $100 – $150 for parties. At that time we hoped to have 4-6 children. $25 for each party fit our budget! I am not saying you have to go that cheap. Maybe you’ve been throwing $1,000 parties and simply want to scale back. Start with whatever dollar amount is comfortable for you and fits within your budget. (Note: we don’t count the cost of gifts we give to our child into that amount. We do gifts separately from the party and that is a separate budget item for us.)

Choose a theme. No, I am not crazy. A theme will greatly help you spend less. A theme takes a pretty hum-drum party game and elevates it to a whole new level! (See my list of party games below and you’ll get my point!) The parameters of the theme will actually help you think creatively. A theme will transform your terrible homemade cake into something fantastic! When choosing a theme you don’t want to go too narrow. Choosing a “Cinderella” theme will be so narrow that it will be a limiting factor while choosing a “Princesses” theme will fit perfectly. Here have been a few of our favorite themes: Cowgirl (a great theme if you have boys and girls), Art, Butterflies, and Camping. Themes on my radar for future parties are Pioneers (think Little House on the Prairie), Fairies, and Spies/Mysteries. I highly recommend choosing a theme for your child or giving them 2-3 choices. Otherwise, you will always be doing a princess or superhero party and that gets old quickly!

Decide on the guests and the Date/Time. One key to sticking to your budget is to figure out your guest list. For some things, you’ll need to buy enough for each guest so you simply have to know how many of them there will be! Keep it simple. For little kids just invite grandparents or involve one close family. For kid parties keep it between 5 and 10 friends. Setting the time of the party will also help you because food tends to be a big cost. If you throw a party from 2:00-3:30 you can get away with serving just the cake. If you throw a party from 4:00-5:30 you might be considering a meal with your party. I am not saying you can’t do a meal as a part of the party – it might fit really well with your theme – it is just a factor that goes into the cost, so it is good to plan that at the beginning. I recommend setting a start and end time that gives you an hour to an hour and a half. Two hours is too long – trust me!

Food doesn’t have to be gourmet for kids. Make a homemade cake and remember that this isn’t the British Baking Show. You are making this for 5 year-olds! Whether you just do it in a 9 X 13 pan or in cake rounds you can make it fun. I usually do cake rounds with either a box mix or a from-scratch mix. Invest in a piping kit (you might not count this toward your party budget – up to you). Homemade frosting is super easy. Then, get creative with decorating! For our cowgirl party, I actually used one of the kids’ toy horses (washed of course) and I made three little “fences” out of pretzels. The decorations didn’t cost me a dime. I am not a cake decorating expert (as you can easily see) but to a group of 5-year-old girls, I am amazing! Serving a meal can be cheap, too! For my daughter’s butterfly party, we had PB&J sandwiches that I cut into the shape of a butterfly with little carrot sticks for antennae, grapes on a skewer that mimicked a caterpillar, and pink lemonade from concentrate that we termed “nectar”. Kids prefer simple foods and they don’t typically eat very much.

Plan far in advance. It is really hard to plan a party last minute AND do it for cheap. Planning a solid month ahead gives you plenty of time to ask around for things to borrow, to price compare if there is something you want to buy, and it gives you time to make things. I actually have a place in my homemaking binder where I brainstorm party ideas. Our next party is 4 months away and I have a list of ideas already written down. As I think of things I just make a note! It is so hard to be creative “last minute” and creativity is required if you are going to keep things under $25! Another benefit of planning ahead is that often the cheap things you might buy online will have a greater shipping time (because they are coming from CHINA!). Planning ahead will eliminate the “Oh, but I have to order this more expensive option so it arrives on time” dilemma.

Make homemade invitations. I like to make invitations and mail them out, but you could also create something you email or hand deliver in order to save on postage. Be clear about drop-off and pick-up times in the invitation. Require an RSVP by a specific date. We also ask guests not to bring gifts! This is just one small thing we do that helps prevent our child from slipping into the “I’m the center of the universe” mentality. We talk about making our party into a blessing for our guests rather than all about the birthday girl. Usually, I phrase it as something like, “No presents please! Cards and pictures are welcome.” I also like that the little guests’ mothers don’t have the added burden of buying something for my kid.

Come up with some games and activities. Plan on each game/activity taking about ten minutes. Cake and singing will take about 20. If your party is scheduled for an hour and a half you’ll want about 7 activities. They always take less time than you think they will! Here are some of our favorites:

• Scavenger hunt. These are super easy to modify for any theme. A scavenger hunt is a great activity for when guests first arrive. We have hidden “gold” (which were spray painted pebbles), dollar store flowers stuck in our lawn, paper butterflies that I cut out, and for our art theme party we hid crayons and had kids find one of each color to fill a crayon box. Use things that are either free or ridiculously cheap!

• A “shooting” game. For a Cowgirl party we taped pictures of “bandits” to red solo cups and we had a “high noon shoot ’em” game! The kids shot at the cups with nerf guns. For our flower party we put flowers in a little hole in the bottom of a plastic cup and had them “water” the flowers from a distance with a squirt gun (the goal was actually to knock the cups down). You can basically attach anything to a red solo cup and shoot at it with either a nerf gun or a squirt gun. If you don’t have a nerf gun or squirt gun then find a family with a boy and borrow a couple! Also, the squirt guns in the picture below were $1.00 from the local dollar store.

• Fun School and Relay Games! Think back to your school days. What were fun games in class or in P.E.? We played “duck duck gray duck” at my five year old’s flower theme party, but instead of calling everyone ducks it was “Red flower, Blue flower, Orange flower, GRAY FLOWER!” Relay races are fun too, and you can simply incorporate some type of prop (e.g., an object they carry or something silly they wear) that fits your theme. Think “egg on the spoon” relay race and just switch up what they are carrying! Could they be frogs who have to hop down to a paper lily pad and pick up a little plastic fly for a “frog” theme? Maybe they have to balance some type of ridiculous huge paper crown on their head during a relay race for a “princess” theme. For one party they had to run down, pick something (I can’t remember exactly what it was!) and whatever they chose gave a direction on how they had to get back to their team. So they had to hop, crab-walk, jump, or tiptoe back to their team.
• A craft project is a great activity and it can double as a party favor. Use some caution because crafts can get expensive. You can find some cheap art supplies at the dollar store. I found 6 packs of little wooden flower shapes that we decorated. Sometimes art projects are a challenge to lead with a big group of little kids. Often we will do “stations” for this and I will take half of the group to do the project and my husband will go do a game with the other half. Then, we’ll switch. For our “Art” themed party, I found dollar store picture frames in two packs and we glued sequins all over them. I made a little printable that said, “I am fearfully and wonderfully made” then we put that inside the frames.

• Bingo. You can make up or find a bingo game for any theme imaginable. I like to use little post-it notes for the space covers. I found this flower bingo game here. You can often find free printable ready-made bingo games online if you don’t want to make your own.

• Teach a song or dance. We taught “If I were A Butterfly” with all the actions at our butterfly party. For our cowgirl party, I found a square dancing CD and book at the library and we taught them how to square dance (that was a big hit!).
• Do a variation of musical chairs! You could cut out pictures of something related to your theme and tape them on the floor instead of chairs, or have the music you choose fit with your theme.
• Balloons. We always buy a little bag of balloons at the dollar store. For some reason kids get a huge kick out of balloons whether they just kick them around or play some type of game with them. You could come up with a million game ideas and they are 25 for a buck! We caught them with nets during out butterfly party and we corralled them as “cattle” during our cowgirl party. The last one was a huge hit, because my husband was the coyote, and kept coming in and scattering the herd!
• Fishing. We put paper “fish” with paper clips in our kiddie pool one year and made a fishing pole with a little magnet on the end. Each fish had either a prize or something silly they had to do like “bear crawl around the tent” or “hop on one foot”. (That was our camping theme). You could “fish” for just about anything.

Use what you have for decorations. Or make them. We either use our real dishes or buy plates at the dollar store. I usually get two or three helium balloons at the dollar store as well. Otherwise, all my decorations are things I have around the house or things we make. My daughter made a whole bunch of paper flowers we taped up for our flower party. For our cowgirl party we taped up signs like “Watering Hole” by the water dispenser on the fridge and we made “Wanted” signs. For our “Camping” party we set up our tent and made a pretend fire with some sticks and yellow tissue paper.

Have Help. While I plan out our parties, my husband is always very involved. He helps lead the games. If your husband isn’t available to help get a girlfriend who can assist. Your attitude and enthusiasm will go farther in making the party fun than all the things you could buy for the party. Be an actress. Be dramatic. Be joyful! If you are stressed out and exasperated during the party that will absolutely spoil the fun! Having someone there to help will make a huge difference, especially if you are trying to manage 6 very excited little girls. If you have a baby at home you might also consider asking someone to watch your baby during the party. In my experience, babies think that parties are a great time to be extra “needy”.

Repeat Themes or share with a friend. My mom likes to do a themed “cousin camp” weekend at her house for the five potty-trained cousins. I often borrow things that she has used for that event for my parties and vice versa. If you have a like-minded friend, you could even plan parties together and use each other’s games and things. Thinking forward to having 4 little girl parties each year I intend to repeat some party themes. We will probably do a camping theme again for a different kid in a few years. Keep a file on your computer of things you made, take pictures to remember what you did, store props in a “birthday party” box – whatever you need to do to make it easy to reuse those items.

Have Simple Prizes. We don’t always have prizes for games but when we do they are simple. Candy, stickers, and pencils from the dollar store! These can double as party favors!

There you have it! I hope some of these ideas help you plan a successful party without breaking the bank! If you found this helpful share it with a friend and subscribe to my blog (below) for updates on future posts!