With Kid’s Parties it really comes down to “Time versus Money”.
If you have time then you are set as an amazing amount of stuff can be made with little money- especially decorations! Goo/Slime/Clay can be made with items from your kitchen.
Even if you don’t have a lot of time, you can still eke out hours little by little, by starting early. The earlier the better! Don’t leave party prep until the “11th hour” as this will create a stressful situation for you and you won’t enjoy any of it.
Consider doing a piñata! It is super cheap (some newspaper, flour and water). Again it is time (not money) Making a piñata is easy and it doesn’t matter if it ends up kind of funny looking (it will be smashed to smithereens anyway 🙂 ).
Piñatas really don’t take as much “hands on” time as you might think. With Piñatas it only takes a few minutes to slap on a bunch of paste-coated strips of paper – the real time required is the drying time. If you start early then you can have a few minutes of hands on time and then just “leave it be” for several days to dry up nicely and then hit it with another layer of the wet pulp…. And repeat. Piñatas can be filled with a couple of dollars of candy and some bits of ribbon and glitter! You get tremendous bang for your buck with a piñata.
Especially if your child helps you then it needn’t worry about how polished the end result is!