Extra money?

[DaystarPearl]

If your trip is all paid for resort, tickets and food(we have the dining plus pkg) how much money do you bring on your trip for extras? My kids all have their own money 100.00 a piece.

 

[Accident]

I hate to break this to you but all your food is not paid for. You still have to pay gratuity on your meals. If it's a group of 6+ people at the table service, a minimum 18% is added to the bill that you owe when done. Being on the meal plan your all going to be ordering the mega expensive everything so that's going to be a lot more than you expect. Just be ready for it so it's not a surprise.

You have the kids budget down and that's going to really help how much additional you need or will spend. I personally budget about $1000 for any vacation on "other costs". We never spend it, but we also never go home upset that we over spent after unforeseen expenses. Most of the time, we go home really happy on how much we didn't spend and what is left over is the start of the next trip budget. The "kids budget" would be in that number for me.

For us, it's generally splurging because we ran into some events, gifts, or weather required more beverages or clothing and we decided to just buy more things while there. For example, did I really need some frozen coffee drinks at starbucks and joffreys while in each park? sure it was hot but I could have went for free water at a quick service. Last trip, a month ago, we were also a little under the weather so we had some more down days and ended up doing things like AMC theater to see a movie and that expense. My daughter did get caught in a really quick but very wet rain. I went for the extra expense to get her dry clothes from a gift shop instead of being wet trying to get to a change of clothes at the resort and back.

I keep enough cash in my pocket to make me comfortable but we do most of our spending as room charges so we don't actually actually touch that the entire trip but it's nice to just have it.

 

[Sarahbelle341]

If you have the plus dining plan you won't have a lot of food expenses except alcoholic beverages if needed & tips as pp said. Souvenir budgets vary widely by family but we aren't big on buying them personally. I think we spent less than $100 total on souvenirs but we have a little boy (he was 5 last trip) that was completely thrilled with the Disney toys I brought from home that I bought on clearance from the Disney store, dollar tree, etc. We bought him a couple of unique items in the park, a blanket, and a ornament for our tree. That's about it. Your tips will vary based on what you order and dining reservations you have. But we aren't big drinkers and rarely ordered anything off the dining plan. We found we were way too busy meeting characters and doing attractions to spend much time shopping and most park merchandise seemed fairly generic and not totally unlike what we can purchase at our local Disney store or online for cheaper.

 

[213Dittohead]

Our breakdown is the following:

$875 for 5 day park tickets for two adults and a child (my employer has a deal for 12% discount)

$150 for week stay at westgate town center, a mile off property

$350 for gas roundtrip from Illinois

I'm planning $1500 for meals and souvenirs.

 

[Lilacs4Me]

If your trip is all paid for resort, tickets and food(we have the dining plus pkg) how much money do you bring on your trip for extras? My kids all have their own money 100.00 a piece.

We were in the same boat: resort, tickets, free dining plan, plane tickets, car rental, kids had $50 gift cards each - virtually everything was prepaid except for tips. We had 4 days of regular dining plan, so 4 table serve credits. We budgeted for each tip, and for gas for the rental car. It ended up being that I felt comfortable bringing $500 cash.

After tips and gas for the rental car, we brought home about $200. I barely spent a cent of the cash other than tips and gas, and the gas was only about $25. I think we bought 2 quick serve lunches out of pocket on the last day (we arrived early the first day and left late the 5th day) for about $20. We stopped on the way out in DTD at the candy store to use up like 10 snack credits.