Booked our Jan.2016 split stay- now to SAVE SAVE SAVE

[LSU25]

Hey everyone! This is my thread to sort of help myself keep track of what I'm saving for our jan. 2016 trip.

There are 6 of us traveling (which is why we have to stay at the club levels)
Me DH MIL Ds5 and our twin 2 y/o twin DD


We are doing our usual split stay, last year it was Contemporary club level / grand Floridian which I wasn't impressed with at all. This year we are venturing out and doing a split stay at the boardwalk and the contemporary club level.

We split the costs so my DH and MIL cover the room costs and I save for food and tickets.

I'm a stay at home mom so my saving money comes from left over weekly grocery money ( I "get" $140 a week and whatever is left over I can use for whatever so currently our Disney fund, I'm an avid coupon ear so our grocery bill has been around $90-100 a week), we also use our Disney Visa and swagbucks.

I currently have $650 saved and will need around 2,200 to pay for everything.

Tickets: $1,300
Food: $900

 

[LSU25]

7/8 - No spend, found a $20 in my wallet and added 951 swagbucks...so I ordered $30 in Walmart gift cards which will be added to my grocery budget.

Total: $670 / $2,200

 

[disney-inspired]

I make okay money but have quite a few bills (ugh debt!) but I'm planning for a 2017 trip so I gotta SAVE SAVE SAVE too. I forgot about Swagbucks, gotta get back to that! Good luck!

 

[tarak]

Have you tried buying gift cards through Raise.com? It works best if you have an ebates account and a target card, but this is what I did. When a friend of mine explained it to me, it seemed really complicated, but it wasn't at the end of the day.

At raise.com you can buy discounted gift cards. I bought two $100 target e-gift cards for $186. Once I had the gift card codes, which was within minutes of the purchase, I used the ebates web portal to buy Disney gift cards from target. Because I have a target red card as the default payment option for target online, I saved $10 on my $200 disney GCs, even though I was paying with the target gift cards I bought on raise. Granted, math is not my strong suit, but as best I can tell, I got $200 in Disney gift cards for $176. In addition to that, I'll get 1% cash back on my disney visa for the original purchase and I'll get 2% in my next ebates check for the target purchase.

We don't do the dining plan and I hate having a huge credit card bill when we come back from vacation, so this is how we have our food bill pre-paid. The savings can add up when you're talking thousands of dollars on a disney trip.