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Tis’ time for the spookiest holiday of the year and a record number of Americans are planning to participate in the scare festival. According to the National Retail Federation, more than two-thirds (67.4 percent) of celebrants will buy Halloween costumes for the holiday, the most in the survey’s 11-year history. The average person will spend $77.52 this Halloween and the total spending on Halloween this year will reach $7.4 billion. That is a lot of money. Here are some tips on how to stretch the budget for everyone so there’s more fun for everyone on All Hallows’ Eve.

Costumes

This post comes from Cathie Ericson at our partner site LearnVest.

Do you feel like you spend half your day processing emails instead of actually working?

You aren’t alone.

Marsha Egan, C.E.O. of InboxDetox.com and author of “Inbox Detox and the Habit of Email Excellence,” says that a full inbox is “an immediate source of stress—it reminds you of everything you’re not going to get done.” According to Egan, the average worker receives 100 to 200 emails per day. Even if you only spend a minute addressing each one, that’s two to three hours on email alone!

With college students back in classes for the fall semester, their parents can only hope that they are making the best use of their time and money. There is a lot at stake — the amount of student loans outstanding is approaching $1.3 trillion, having mushroomed by over 50 percent in less than three years.

We all know the standard line about education being an investment in the future. It certainly can be; but with the amount of student debt increasing so rapidly, there is good reason to suspect some of this is being done out of desperation rather than as a logical path to an opportunity.

For one thing, the job market has been so hard on young people that many are returning to school out of frustration with not being able to find a job. However, unless you are acquiring in-demand skills in the process, doing this simply delays the inevitable struggle to find work and racks up debt in the process.

I can still remember the days when the term “generation gap” was all the rage. Back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, that term was bandied about to describe the yawning philosophical chasm between Baby Boomers and their parents on topics as diverse as the Vietnam War, the length of one’s hair, and different attitudes toward sex.

Over the years, though, the term has faded from widespread use. But another gap in inter-generational thinking grew steadily more evident when it came to saving and spending. The folks Tom Brokaw called “The Greatest Generation” grew up in Depression-era America, fought World War II, then scrimped, saved, and made their way through college on the GI Bill, somehow managing to land jobs that enabled them to squirrel away enough scratch for an FHA-financed suburban starter home.