Cheap & Easy Costumes

“50 Cheap & Easy Halloween Costumes for Adults & Children.”

The feature, which is posted on the Ask Coupon Sherpa blog, offers a wide array of recommendations. Among them are:

Progressive Insurance's Flo: All you need is a white shirt, white apron, name tag and a headband and you're set to cut insurance deals for fellow party goers.

Job Seeker: Whether you're unemployed or gainfully employed, this costume is a cinch. Dress in your favorite suit, grab a suitcase and resume and you're set to go. Those truly unemployed might want to stock the briefcase with real resumes, just in case that perfect job prospect shows up at the party.
Backwards Man: This simple concept was popular in the 1980s and is due for a revival. Simply put your clothes on backwards, pad your front to give yourself some "back" and voila, you're ready.

Gangster: Some may prefer the under-dressed Sopranos look, but for a traditional gangster you'll need dress pants, a vest, fedora and toy machine gun. Considering the zero-tolerance policies at most American schools, children may prefer to nix the gun for an empty violin case.

Pile of Laundry: (My fav) The perfect costume for college students! Simply pin clothes onto an old outfit or, for a more complex costume, cut the bottom out of an old laundry basket, fill it with clothes and wear it around your waist. A hat made from a washed-out Clorox bottle adds a jaunty touch. Don't forget to toss in a few used fabric-softener sheets.

Work of Art: This couldn't be easier: Hang a large picture frame around your neck. If you want to make it complicated, consider dressing up as a specific work of art, such as the Mona Lisa or a Van Gogh self-portrait.

Web site: Glasses wearers can turn themselves into a Web site by draping fake spider webs all over those eyepieces.

The Nerd: Some can go from work to Halloween parties without a change of clothes, but for non-nerds, pair high-water pants, a short-sleeved dress shirt buttoned to the top with pens in the pocket and appropriate ink stains. Take the nose and mustache off a set of Groucho glasses and you've completed the look.

The article even includes a recipe for fake blood (which includes Karo syrup and red food coloring among other ingredients) and instructions to create fake wounds.

Scary Costumes Make for Warm Memories

I am happy to host Barry Boone and his hints on saving this year for Halloween. I hope that

Image via Wikipedia

some of the following will help you out.

Barry Boone, the founder and CEO of www.DealHunting.com and www.CurrentCodes.com, wants the memories of smiling youngsters trick-or-treating this fall to remain fresh long after the last candied apple has been eaten and the last red cape has been folded and tucked away. And so he is reminding parents that they can find unbeatable savings on costumes, candy and digital photo processing online this Halloween.

“We have lots of listings of coupons and sales for retailers that sell costumes, like BuyCostumes.com and Costume SuperCenter,” says Boone, “but we also have really great coupons for stores that do digital photo processing, like Snapfish.com, KodakGallery.com and YorkPhoto.com. So whenever you take pictures of your kids in their Halloween costumes, you can find a coupon to process those digital photos at a great price.”

“DealHunting.com is a daily shopping list,” Boone explains. “You can go there on a daily basis and find a listing of all the different good sales we found on the internet for that day. These are the newest, latest, greatest sales, and if there are some really deeply discounted items for those stores, we’ll have them listed.”

Sister site Currentcodes.com is a database of coupons for more than 1,300 online stores ranging from Amazon.com to Zales and everything in between, including CompUSA, Disney, Esprit, The Gap, JCPenney, L.L. Bean, Old Navy, Orbitz, Overstock.com, Staples and more. Each has a place within its shopping cart for a "coupon code" that gives a percent or dollar amount off of a purchase.

“If you don't know the code, you can't take advantage of the discount,” says Boone. “You can find these secret discount codes and coupon codes listed on many sites across the internet, but the problem with these sites is that they're usually personal homepages, and don't maintain their lists.”

DealHunting.com and Currentcodes.com have a full-time trained staff whose only job is to find new sales, coupon and discount codes and verify the accuracy of the existing database. “We don't flood you with ads or popups, and we don’t require any personal information from our visitors.” Boone says.

What sets DealHunting.com and Currentcodes.com apart from their competitors, Boone feels, is that “we are by far two of the most thorough sites as far as the breadth of companies we cover.”

In the months ahead, Boone and his team will launch additional features for searching products more efficiently.