One of the things we are doing on our upcoming trip to save money is to go to
Walmart once we get there and buy breakfast items to have breakfast in our room/house. We are currently booked into the All Star Music Family Suite but it is $250 a night. We can get a 4 bedroom, 3 bath private home with a pool 3 miles from Disney for $87 a night. If free dining gets offered for our dates we will stay with our reservation on property but if we have to pay out of pocket for food we are staying off-site and saving $1,400 on our resort. That is more than enough to pay for our food out of pocket. If we do stay off-site we will only eat one meal in the park, a CS lunch, then when we leave property we will go eat at McDonald's or Denny's or some place cheap and save money that way too. If your family doesn't mind eating sandwiches you can take in a soft sided cooler, like PP said, and put it in a locker for the day and go back and get it out at lunch time and have your very inexpensive sandwiches. But for my family that won't work because nobody likes sandwiches. We are buying a couple of cases of water at Walmart and are going to take in one or two bottles of water per person in our backpack along with some snacks of each person's choosing to save from having to buy and drinks or snack while in the park.
Me and the 3 kids are flying in and my husband is driving in. Mainly because he doesn't want to fly and because we want to have our own car while we are there. But even if yo stayed off property and rented a car it would be cheaper than where we are staying.
If you have a family of 4 or less you can stay in a value room for less than $100 a night. But off property is always going to be cheaper. I looked into houses through VRBO but they were kind of higher than everyone else. I went through Villa Direct (villadirect.com) and found the perfect house for us. It has 4 bedrooms so each kid will have their own room, it has a private pool, a fully equipped kitchen, a game room with a pool table, Foosball, air hockey and ping pong, so the kids will stay occupied in the evenings. It has free high speed internet. The only thing it doesn't have included in the price is pool heat. And that costs anywhere from $25 a day to $40 a day JUST TO HEAT THE POOL! So we won't be doing that. But we are going in October so the pool should be plenty warm enough for the kids to play in it.
One of the biggest money savers, I think is where you sleep and how you eat. If I could get my family to eat sandwiches we could save $50 every day not having to buy CS lunches. Over 10 days that is $500 we could save. Eating breakfast in the room saves about $35 a day over the course of 10 days, $350. Not buying everyone a $4 snack twice a day at Disney will save $40 a day. However if we get the free dining plan, that will be a $1,700 value for our 10 day stay so we will probably keep that and stay on property. It works out money wise both ways, to stay on property with free dining or to stay off property and pay for our own food.
