An innocent young family moves into an old home. They become haunted by ghosts and demons dancing to the tune of Tiny Tim’s “Tiptoe Through the Tulips.” They move to another less old, less creepy home only to find out that it’s not the house that’s haunted – it’s their kid.

Good horror starts with a premise in reality, and there are few things more ubiquitously scary than financial troubles. You’ll notice this comes up time and time again in your favorite thrillers, often offered as the reason why a family would stay in a haunted house.

While it seems to be an inevitable reality for many millennials faced with rising costs of living and housing crises, it is largely recommended to avoid extending one’s credit to purchase a home – especially if it’s old, large, and/or in need of repairs.

In The Haunting of Hill House, for instance, the young couple invests everything into the mansion hoping to flip it for a profit, if they can just make it through without dying. Spoiler alert: it doesn’t go well for them or their brood of children.

Often movies will have historically financially strapped figures such as single parents pitted against demons, grief, trauma, and severe mental illness – The Conjuring 2, Ouija, Thi13en Ghosts, and Insidious 3 come to mind. Suffice it to say, a lack of money can be a big motivator to ignore a few spooky apparitions.

Insidious holds a place dear in my heart for its nostalgia-inducing jump scares and spine-tingling music. It’s just the right amount of campy fun, unique ghostly characters, and paranormal thriller to make it in my top year-round tv rotation. I would take any excuse to rewatch movies 1, 2, and 4 (IMO 3 is interesting, and arguably the scariest, but is almost an outlier in the Insidious storyline). Just under the surface of every movie is a simmering mess of financial consequences.

The home of the initial haunting, 5340 Victoria Point Drive.

We begin with the family moving into a beautiful 4-bed, 2-bath Craftsman with their 3 children. The actual location of the home is 5340 Victoria Point Drive in Los Angeles. Their furniture is nice but not lavish. As a rockstar of a stay-at-home mom, Renai handles the day-to-day while her husband works as a junior high or high school teacher. Already we’re entering dangerous territory here by the simple fact that a similar teacher in the LA school system would be making $71,600 a year (about $5,967 a month)** and this home is valued at over $650,000 in 2010. This would be an estimated monthly payment of about $2,700 a month (30-year fixed mortgage with 4.7% APR). Technically, this fits in their budget, but woof.

Side note: We often don’t really see the cumulative affect of the hikes in housing. To put this in perspective, this home is now worth about $1.48 million only 10 years later.

** LA School District salaries are based on certifications, tenure, and a graduated pay scale that is just incomprehensible without more knowledge of Josh’s position. Let’s assume he is a Generic Great Teacher™ in pay scale group 27 and pay scale level 10 making about $85,000 a year in 2021. It’s seriously criminal what our teachers are paid.

When their son Dalton slips into a coma, he is hospitalized for 3 months before being moved back home. A nurse begins assisting Renai with at-home care. With medical debt being one of the top causes of bankruptcy in America and their son without an identifiable prognosis, this is already a nightmare before we even see a single spirit.

After repeated hauntings, Renai begs to move to another home, accusing the exhausted Josh of not being supportive. Here is where we see the only slip in the stoic mask Josh is wearing when he angrily says “One of us has to work to pay Dalton’s medical bills.”

This is actually where being a schoolteacher works in the family’s favor. The medical benefits provided to state employees are notoriously beneficial given the low pay, but with deductibles and out-of-pocket expenses, in-home care is difficult to find and keep for indefinite conditions.

However, he acquiesces, and they move into a smaller house at 1153 S. Point View. It was valued at about $1.1 million in 2010 (currently at $2.1 million), with an estimated monthly payment of $4,300 (based on the rent listed in early 2012).

So, within less than 6 months, this single-income family with 3 kids has purchased and moved into 2 separate homes in one of the most expensive real estate markets in the world and incurred medical costs for their child in a coma. Within the last year, they had maternity expenses related to the new baby daughter. And before the end of the movie, they will be staring down a dark tunnel of the inevitable trauma therapy and legal defense costs related to the murder of medium Elise.

Considering I’ve moved just twice in the last year as a child-free renter, I’m just going to say right now: Screw it. I think I’d fare better living with the ghosts.

Josh & Lorraine Lambert, with the Bride in Black.

They must have been extremely frugal and built up a significant savings to tap into to afford the closing costs, movers, and deductibles that would’ve been required to make these transitions possible. I would typically assume family money, but Josh’s mother is a key character in the series, and we learn that she was a single mother working as a nurse in the 70s. A respectable vocation, but as a daughter of a single-income nurse in the 90s, nothing that would provide a huge nest egg or a significant family net. Renai was a music teacher prior to the birth of their children, so no large income there either.

Renai and Josh are in their early-to-mid 30s. The Federal Reserve reports the median net worth of individuals under 35 as $10,960 and for those 35-44 as $49,910. (I’ve chosen to use the median, as the mean skews the data, and this is a more reasonable estimate given the economy in 2010.)

Assuming they both worked especially hard to save for down payments, children, & retirement, let’s take the average of this number and say they had at least $32,000 in cash savings and above-average credit scores. Let’s also assume they have little other debt, having already paid off the bulk of the $2,750 out-of-pocket costs for Cali’s birth the previous year. With current max retirement contributions for the 403(b) at $19,500, and an estimated 10 years of retirement, perhaps they would have about $200,000 in retirement to draw from – this certainly qualifies as an eligible expense for early withdrawal. So, with roughly $232,000 to draw from in cash and retirement funds, they must cover the following:

(Max $800 x 5 active family members)

It is impossible for the family to have put down the recommended 20% down payment for both houses; a 10% down payment still leaves $45,600 in retirement.

Notice that the best of intentions from naïve couples often are the beginning of a horror movie. While we can debate the existence of ghosts, demons, the Further and beyond, you can’t really deny the existence of mortgages. Also, I’m not really sure if debtor’s courts would accept paranormal activity as a reason for the cancellation of a mortgage…

It is near impossible for Renai and Josh to have escaped financial ruin by the end of the series. A lot of these numbers are based on the LA area and would not be nearly as high in lower cost-of-living or more rural areas. They also assume that there were little economic difficulties for the family prior to the haunting, as well as an inflated savings account compared to most young couples. There is no way the events above wouldn’t have caused total financial atrophy.

Not that it necessarily would matter given they had a few other things they would be more concerned about at present, but there is another financial matter that should be addressed:

If your husband and the father of your children were possessed by a serial killer and tried to kill you and your children (in addition to the actual murder investigation of Elise), would divorce be in the cards after the credits have rolled?

Surely it would be highly traumatic for Renai and the boys, and I would personally feel uneasy sleeping next to that person for months after, even if I’d stared in their eyes for a moment and declared otherwise. A divorce would be statistically probable and would be the final nail in the coffin for the couple’s finances.

Here’s hoping they would at least be able to recoup some costs by the selling of their story, but rarely does that happen.