As a family, how do you save for you trip?

[littlbugmom]

I'm looking for different ideas for saving for our next trip. What are some of the things you do as a family to save money for your vacations?

 

[AutismMom2006]

We have only been saving a couple months but here is what I'm doing:

1) Disney Vacation Account - I contribute a small automatic amount every month and also put "found" money in there (my dad sent me a Mother's Day card with some cash inside - Disney Vacation Account!)

2) I use cash for my spending - groceries/medicine/clothing/etc. (everything but gasoline pretty much) and I put all the change and the one dollar bills in a jar with a Tinkerbell sticker on the front, in about 6 weeks I've saved over $100 in the jar without feeling the pinch, when it fills to the top I will take it to my bank and then transfer to Disney Vacation account

3) I plan to ask for Disney Gift cards for birthday & Christmas

4) Motivation - I found a WDW "countdown" paper on Pinterest, you color in a Mickey balloon every day closer to going. Instead, I've been coloring in a balloon for every $100 saved up, so I can see I'm making progress towards my goal.

5) Menu Planning - this helps me keep my grocery budget under control and avoid drive-thru trips that $$$ can go in my savings

 

[tami82]

My husband is one who just likes to pay as the charge card bill comes so he doesn't really save like I do. We do have an American Express cash rewards card which I use for everything like groceries, etc... and my husband pays the total off each month. This year I agreed to pay for the food part of our trip as we are staying at a more expensive place and without free dining. I have been saving since August. I have a home business so I just put so much away every month in an envelope and forget about it.

I know some people buy the Disney gift cards and buy them every month or so until they add up.

 

[Mousemommy1]

We book our trip a year in advance. We put our deposit down and then divide the balance by 10. Those are the monthly payments we work into our budget and we have it paid off before our trip. So, not really saving...just budgeting. We have a Disney line item in our budget, lol.

For our spending money, we have started putting $50/pay period into an envelope. That will give us PLENTY of cash before we go!

 

[Princess Minnie321]

We got a venture capital card for the 40,000 mile bonus which helped with the airfare.

I sold some stuff on Craig's list that we did not need and put the money into the vacation savings account.

We use our American Express card for every purchase and to get cash rewards. I pay it weekly to avoid interest.

We started eating home more and put the money we were saving from not eating out as much into the vacation account.

 

[TWK]

We got a credit card with airline points, so for our family of 5 we got airline tickets for under $250. I choose an amount that I need for my paycheck, and deposit that amount into the bank every week, anything over that amount goes into the vacation fund... usually about $20-50 a week... I put that cash into my safe at home. I deposit it into the bank before we pay for vacation, and then it isn't a big hit, because the money wasn't there before.

 

[Twilight Sparkle]

Change jar - we generate a ton of change somehow

Disney GCs

Passing on other wants and putting the money we would have spent towards our trip

DH and I opt to count the trip as our anniversary and Christmas gifts to each other since we like to go in Jan and our anniversary is in Dec, so the money we would have spent on things goes to this.

It also helps that we break up the costs into four different payments. First we pay for our room via David's DVC. Then a couple of months later, we pay for the dining plan. If we choose not to do the dining plan this year, we will take the money we would have paid and go ahead and put it on a gift or visa card designated for dining. Before the 60 day mark, we buy our tickets. Right before we leave, we pay for Memory Maker. The change jar and some DisneyGC become spending money for the trip.

 

[henry72]

We have been doing Disney Gift Cards from Sams. You pay $142.98 for 3 $50 gift cards (saving about $7). Also we use the points on our credit card for a Visa Gift Card for the trip. These are the things we are doing before the trip but even before we paid for our tickets/room (DVC points) we typically set aside money each month for vacations.

 

[edk35]

Buy Disney gift cards each week or each payday. We don't spend any coins. We put them in our change can. I have money taken out each payday and it goes into an online savings acct. Any rebates or random checks you might get for whatever reason....go into our vacation acct.

 

[pinkprincess30]

We start by creating a budget. Then we save as much as possible from our paycheck each week, putting the money straight in to savings, and pre-paying for things as we have enough. I'm not sure if this is what you're asking, but here's some specific ways we involved the kids in saving toward our last trip:

1. Give them options, offering to put $ in the Disneyland jar...this way they get to invest/make sacrifices, but we don't always have to be the bad guy and say no all the time!
Examples: We can order dessert/go out to pizza tonight or put an extra $20 in the jar. What do you say?
Mom, can we do a special movie night? Sure! Should we rent a movie and buy special candy, or watch a movie on Netflix, have popcorn from home & put the extra $5-$10 in the jar? What do you think?
Hey mom & dad can we go to the pool? We could go to the pool today ($20) or go float the river for free. What do you think?

2. Let the kids collect cans/bottles (at the office or at home, from grandma and grandpa, etc.) and let them turn them in. All funds go in the jar. I work for a roofing company and in the summer water bottles are always easily found around the shop! We turn them in for a 5 cent refund.

3. Extra opportunities for chores/odd jobs at home or Grandma's house.

4. Encourage them to contribute some of their own money to the jar (The faster we save, the faster we go!).

5. A family yard sale. ALL money goes in the jar. Eliminates the kids wanting to keep the $ from toys that were theirs...that gets complicated!

6. Any found money goes in the jar (small amounts of cash from the laundry, coins found in the car, etc.).

7. Offer Disney gift cards as gift options for special occasions throughout the year (they may not always want ALL Disney cards, so we talk about it ahead of time). This becomes their individual spending $, not for the general DLR fund.

We have done it both ways, where they contributed nothing and one trip they helped in the ways described above. By FAR the best experience was when they contributed. It gave them a sense of ownership and they LOVED being a part of things and felt so PROUD when we had enough to go. Best thing we ever did was involve the kids.

Edit to add: We also make small cuts that aren't always noticeable in order to save more, not making a big deal about it. For us, groceries is the area in our budget with most potential for savings. We make homemade cookies instead of getting expensive baked goods, make more foods from scratch, cut back on expensive junk foods, etc. We also will make small changes such as going out for a $1 soft serve vs. a $4 cone at Baskin Robin's. The kids still get a special treat and no one feels the squeeze, but there is so much spending you'll be able to cut back on if you really think creatively.

 

[littlbugmom]

Thank you for these ideas.
We tend to think of "saving for Disney" in a very general sense......not eating out as often, skipping big purchases that year, etc...
I'd like our family to make a more concrete effort to save. Something more tangible. More physical and measurable.

 

[wallskm]

For us, vacations are a line item in our budget, no different than groceries or utilities. We always have a vacation of some kind in the works so each month I apply a payment in our monthly budget amount to whatever vacation is next to be paid off. When one's paid off I start working on the next trip! I plan to spend the next 2 months' worth of budget buying Disney gift cards to use on food/souvenirs for our October trip, and then I will start paying on our June 2017 cruise! Once that's paid off I am going to spend a few months applying the budget to our onboard account for the cruise to pay for our excursions and whatnot!

 

[amy1981]

I buy the Sam's gift cards online so I can use ebates and pay for them with my Disney Visa card. I get discounted gift cards, plus my ebates $, plus my rewards dollars from Visa. Then, I put the gift cards onto my Disney Savings account; for every $1,000 you put on you get a $20 Disney gift card. I like putting the gift cards into the Disney savings account because it keeps all of your money in one place. It seems like a process, I know, but it doesn't take much time really. I use my Visa rewards points to get a rewards gift card to Disney plus I get the savings account promo gift cards and I use all of those for souvenirs, snacks etc. In terms of getting my family on board, we have "Disney Dollars" that my kids earn by doing chores and helping out. I found a template and printed off little paper money that looks like monopoly money with Disney character faces on them. They turn these into me before our trip for their own gift card. When we get to Disney they know that they have X amount of dollars that they've earned to spend on whatever they want. This cuts down on impulse purchases because they want to wait and spend their hard earned money on something they really love.

 

[gatormom2tots]

Change jar- we collected $1300 in about 18 months.
Gift cards- we buy them at Kroger when they offer 4x fuel points and then get a dollar off each gallon of gas. As a family with 4 kids with all 3 in activities, this is much more cost productive than the other gift card methods out there.
Extra job- my husband is an attorney, but delivers pizza on the weekends purely for Disney money. That way we pay for our trips upfront, cash, and no hit on savings, retirement, college funds, etc. We stash away 100-150 a week. We did this for the last trip and saved about 10k for our "mega" trip. Took about 2 years- but it was an amazing trip.

He had sad he was going to stop..but I think he has decided to do it again for another trip.

 

[Pesky]

1. Disney Visa card -- I use it for a ton of stuff, pay it off every month (you have to be really disciplined about that), and then we save all the reward dollars for our trip. Quite frankly, there are other cards out there with better rewards like mileage cards but DH has so many miles from his travel and I do adore my Nemo card, that I just use that.
2. Gift cards -- at our local Kroger chain or Target with my red card.
3. Disney Movie Rewards -- save up my points and cash them in for $10 Disney GCs. Every little bit!
4. Budget -- we've been budgeting for this trip for about 3 years! I do DVC point rental so that way I have to pay it in advance. I bought tickets earlier in the year before the price hike. Helps spread out our costs.
5. Garage sales -- we save the money we make from any garage sales for our vacations. We clear out stuff and get to save more to boot!
6. Change jars. We've done before a $5 rule - if there was a $5 bill in our wallet, it had to go into the jar. That added up fast but was a bit more painful.

 

[mkla2015]

1- We run EVERYTHING through the Disney Visa Card (premier)
2- Buy a pack of giftcards from Sams every 2 weeks
3- We have a Disney Savings account w/ direct deposits every payday

 

[MichiganScott]

^ If you found a different card, you would likely earn rewards faster. The Disney reward cards are one of the worst-performing ones out there.

 

[Luna81]

We do swagbucks. Without too much effort we can average 50-100 a month there. I cash those out for Target gift cards. Use those to buy Disney gift card (online, since I have a Target card on that account I get 5% off) then load those to the disney vacation club. I also did some secret shopping and stuff last year, and let that money sit in Paypal. Then when Target had 10% off their gift cards we purchased a few sets of $300 (could only buy $300 at a time) for $270..then used that $300 to buy disney cards on the website with a mother 5% off.

Just signed up for the Disney free level credit card. Getting a $200 gift card once we spend $500. Going to use it for the purchases we usually make with our Amazon card-other than our Amazon purchases. Hope to save up a bunch for food that way.

 

[BLAZEY]

I have a vacation/fun account which i have $$ deposited to each payday. Every year in June I increase this amount by a bit as I get my annual raise then. Part of my bonus also goes into this account. We generally go on a big holiday every 15-24 months depending on how many little holidays we take.
I have a couple of rewards credit cards that I earn enough points to to extras and our last 2 Disney trips I had enough for free passes.

 

[Vijoge]

Once we decided to take our DGD's to WDW I began a no-spend policy. We don't have credit cards so we knew we would be paying for this entire trip up front with cash. Every cent we made, outside of what was absolutely needed for expenses (mortgage, utilities, insurance, gas, car repairs, medical, groceries) has been put in a savings account. We're on an austerity budget. Right now I have $11,000.16 that I've saved since the first of January. Yes, the 16 cents is the freaking interest I've earned lol. The only problem is, our flights will be released by SWA on Thursday and now I really don't want to dip into the savings account for plane tickets. The first withdrawal is going to be terribly traumatic.