The Federal Reserve says the McCallisters were 1 percenters in “Home Alone”
The New York Times crunched the numbers to try to answer the age-old question: How rich are the McCallisters really?
It’s been 33 years since Home Alone hit theaters, and decades on, fans still have a few lingering questions: Could Kevin’s family really not realize that they were missing an entire child? How did the Wet Bandits survive all the wild traps that Kevin sent their way? And what on earth did the McCallisters do to afford such a lavish home and a pricey Christmas trip to Paris?
The New York Times is attempting to answer that last question, conducting a deep-dive into the McCallister family finances. For insight, the Times turned to multiple economists from the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, and the Fed crunched the numbers, examining the house’s estimated property value in 1990 and Chicago-area income data.
The result? The Fed says that the McCallisters were definitely part of the 1 percent. According to their numbers, Peter (John Heard) and Kate McCallister (Catherine O’Hara) would have needed to earn at least $305,000 annually in 1990 — or about $665,000 in 2022 — to comfortably afford that house, which is located on the North shore in Chicago. (A Zillow estimate priced the house at about $2.4 million in 2022.) Those numbers today would put the McCallisters in the top 1 percent of Chicago-area earners.
Home Alone never actually reveals what the McCallisters do for work, but the novelization, written by Todd Strasser, suggests that Kate is a fashion designer and Peter is a generic businessman. At the very least, Kate's job would explain why Kevin has access to so many mannequins — and maybe suggest that creativity runs in the family.
Read the full breakdown over at The New York Times.
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