They had a beautiful mansion, took an elaborate vacation, and lit the house with more holiday lights than most people paying a monthly electric bill can even fathom.
Pretty much every adult that’s ever watched the hit movie “Home Alone” has wondered just how much the McCallister family was worth, and after probably viewing the movie multiple times over the course of the last 33 years, it’s time to find out!
Let’s Talk About The McCallister’s House In “Home Alone”
A mystery to many for a long time, and now the secrets are finally coming out. Just how much did the McCallister family make to be able to afford a mansion in a rich Chicago neighborhood and a family trip to Paris, which included a bunch of first-class plane tickets, during the holidays?
Economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago recently answered the burning questions on everyone’s minds during a time that many are rewatching “Home Alone” to get some holiday spirit. The Federal Reserves has determined that the McCallister family is in the one percent of Chicago residents based on the value of their large home, according to The New York Times.
“In 1990, the house was affordable only for the top 1 percent of Chicago household incomes, and that would still be the case today, according to economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago,” as per The New York Times. “The home would have been affordable to a household with an income of $305,000 in 1990 (about 665,000 in 2022).”
This news means that Peter and Kate McCallister were raking in the dough in 1990 making at least $305,000 a year! That translates into more than $600,000 in recent years, which also means the house is worth a lot more now too. In fact, the house that’s located on the North Shore of Chicago was estimated to be worth about $2.4 million by Zillow in 2022.
A Walk Down Memory Lane…
The iconic “Home Alone” house was built in 1920 and belonged to John and Cynthia Abendshien, who didn’t live in the home for long before the production company reached out to them about using their home in the movie, according to Fancy Pants Home.
It took about four to five months to shoot the film and the owners of the home were living in the house during filming. The couple’s daughter, Laura Abendshien, was just 6 years old during filming, so imagine how fun this experience was for her! She was living a real-life “Home Alone” experience.
In 2020, Laura appeared on the U.K. morning show, “This Morning” to reveal what it was like living in the house during filming.
“We stayed in the house pretty much the entire period, which was about four or five months,” Laura said during the morning show, as PEOPLE reported. “In order to avoid appearing onscreen, we would have to crawl around the window line from room to room.”
She also shared how the cast would hang out around the house between scenes and that the movie’s star, Macaulay Culkin, and his brother Keiran, would hang out in her bedroom.
“They would spend time in the house when they weren’t filming their scenes,” she recalled. “Macaulay Culkin used my room to study with his tutor and his brother [Keiran], wasn’t filming as much, so he would just hang out in my room.”
Lauren also said that while the family saw “something special” happening while the movie was filming, they didn’t expect it to be the hit it still is today.
“We saw something special was happening, but we didn’t anticipate how much of a hit it would be,” she said. “It was very surreal when the movie came out and all of a sudden it’s holiday season in 1990 and it was an endless row of cars and people wanted to see the house and take photographs and that was very new to us, but we grew to love it and we shared the magic of the movie.”