My wife and I really wanted to take our son to Disney World, but we were dreading the costs. With some patience and planning, we were able to stay on budget and have a great time. It’s an experience we never had as kids, so it felt really good to be able to provide our son with the Disney experience – without going into debt.
Big decisions first
We began planning out the big items first: tickets (from the MWR), travel, and where to stay. After looking at flights, airport parking, hotels along the route, and gas prices, it was going to be significantly cheaper to drive. We’d need an extra day of travel each way but that wasn’t a huge deal.
We originally looked at staying at a Disney hotel, but the sticker shock had us looking for other options pretty quickly. Even Shades of Green was pricey for the week, and it wasn’t available on all the days we needed anyway. Luckily, we found a nice house on VRBO about 20 minutes from Disney World.
Creating a detailed budget
We used data from previous trips and created a detailed budget. We included nearly everything you could think of including hotels, food, gas, tickets, wristbands for the park, and daily costs such as parking, lockers, Genie+, Lightning Passes, and souvenirs.
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I used Excel to total everything up and add a 15% buffer to cover any expenses we hadn’t thought of. In total, we estimated the whole trip with five days at the park to be $6,600 total. We were a tad overwhelmed with that number. However, we wanted to have plenty saved up so we could enjoy ourselves and make the most of the experience.
Tracking expenses using a Google Form
I created a Google Form to help record our expenses. We entered every purchase into it through links I’d placed on our phones. It’s almost like having your own app to save everything into a Google Sheet.
Adjusting in real time
Anticipating costs and saving the money upfront made everything less stressful. We were aware of our spending, but it didn’t feel limiting either. We had the money in our savings account just for this purpose.
We enjoyed ourselves but tried to pack lunch or cook at the house where we could. We did get the Dole Whip and Batuu’s Blue Milk everyone had told us about. I’ll let you decide if they’re worth the hype or not.
At the end of each day, I did a quick check to see how we were doing. Except for one day, we came in under budget every single day.
The [lack of] aftermath
After the trip, I used Excel to see how we did and analyzed where we spent more or less than we thought. Overall, we spent way more on souvenirs, less on food, and less overall than we’d planned for.
The wait times for the Disney dining experiences were super long, so we didn’t eat on property very much at all. However, we just went with the flow and if we saw something we wanted, we got it within reason. We even snuck in a few “mommy and drinks” here and there.
The grand total for the trip came out to just under $5,200 (Note: Costs may have changed since November 2022). This is still a large amount of money, but we had a great time other than getting COVID on the way home. We felt it was money well spent!
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