2023-12-25 14:00:06
With a spatula
December 25 2023, 8:00 am
How rich were Kevin’s parents in “Home Alone?”
Movie lovers have debated the McCallister family’s money for years, and the Chicago Federal Reserve cleared all doubts
The battle in Home Alone between 8-year-old Kevin McCallister (Macaulay Culkin) and two thieves known as the Wet Bandits has been shown on screens around the world every Christmas since the film’s release in 1990.
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By Infobae
And each year, for some viewers, the McCallister home and lifestyle inspires its own tradition: wondering just how rich this family was.
The New York Times consulted economists and people involved in the film to find the answer.
Early in the film, one of the thieves, Harry (Joe Pesci), tells his partner, Marv (Daniel Stern), that the McCallister house is their main target in a wealthy neighborhood.
“That, Marv, that’s the icing on the cake,” Harry says, before speculating that there are a lot of “valuable things” in the house, such as VCRs, stereos, very valuable jewelry, and “negotiable securities that are sold.” “they find little.”
Macaulay in Home Alone 2, in 1992 (The Grosby Group)
The house is the best clue to how much money the McCallisters have.
The icing on the cake, or at least its exterior, is a house that exists in the real world and is located at 671 Lincoln Avenue, in the Chicago suburb of Winnetka, one of the most expensive neighborhoods in the United States, according to Realtor.com. It appears to have enough space for Kevin and his four siblings to each have their own room, but it can also accommodate an army of visitors.
In 1990, housing was affordable for only the top 1 percent of Chicago households, and that would still be the case today, according to economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.
The economists —Max Gillet, senior research analyst; Cindy Hull, assistant vice president and acting head of the financial markets group, and Thomas Walstrum, senior business economist, reached this conclusion after examining data that includes household income in the Chicago metropolitan area for 1990 and 2022, the value ownership of the home, current mortgage rates, and customary taxes and insurance.
Devin Ratray from “Home Alone” is investigated for raping a friend in her New York home in 2017
Assuming that the McCallisters spent no more than 30 percent of their income on housing, the economists also determined that the house would have been affordable for a household with an annual income of $305,000 in 1990 (about $665,000 in 2022).
By mid-2022, a similar home would cost about $2.4 million, according to Zillow’s estimate for Home Alone’s house. A property of that value would be affordable for a household with an income of $730,000, which would rank in the top 1 percent of households in the Chicago area, according to economists.
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