It’s no secret that it’s not cheap to take a Disney vacation—and once you pay for your hotel and your park tickets, you still have to worry about paying for food and souvenirs once you get there! It’s a lot to think about! One thing that we like to do that helps us budget for Disney is to collect Disney gift cards throughout the year. We use these gift cards to purchase everything when we’re at Disney World—from character meals to spirit jerseys!
Why Use Gift Cards?
We love using gift cards to make our purchases while we’re at Disney World. It really helps our budget to spread out that spending rather than dropping all that money at once. Additionally, by purchasing Disney gift cards throughout the year, that money is earmarked for Disney only and won’t get spent on anything else. It’s a great feeling when we arrive at Walt Disney World and we have our budget set and ready to spend!
We usually take a trip to Disney World about once a year, which gives us 10–12 months to collect Disney gift cards for our next trip! I usually try to buy $50–$75 in Disney gift cards every month. It doesn’t always happen—sometimes we need to use that money for something else—but with that goal, we usually end up with several hundred dollars in gift cards that we can use on food and souvenirs while we are in Walt Disney World.
Set Your Budget
When you first book your trip, figure out how much money you might spend on food and/or souvenirs. You can view almost all restaurant menus on https://disneyworld.disney.go.com/. Consider whether or not you want to have a few character meals. Or if your family tends to skip breakfast, or if you like to have a big breakfast and then survive on snacks until dinner. If there’s a certain souvenir you want, factor that in too. Round up if you think you can manage it. 😊 Then take that number and divide it by the number of months you have until your trip. That’s the amount in gift cards you should aim to be able to purchase every month!
I know it’s easy to want EVERYTHING when you’re in Disney World, but try to be realistic with your calculations. It’s not going to do anyone any favors if you spend so much money collecting Disney gift cards throughout the year that you can’t afford your groceries or something. 😅
Disney food and souvenirs are NOT cheap! But it really takes some of the stress out of the trip if we know we’ve already got money to spend. We were lucky to book our 2019 trip with the free dining deal, so we used our gift cards for a few character meals and souvenirs. Having free dining was the best! But Disney isn’t offering any dining plans right now, so we’re planning to step up our gift card game for our Spring 2021 trip.
Make Your Gift Card Purchase Count!
My favorite time to pick up a gift card is when I’m doing my grocery shopping every week. This is an especially good idea when the grocery store (mine is Kroger) is having the 2x (or 4x) fuel points on gift cards special. This is a great time to buy gift cards because then you save on your gas!
I also like to pick up gift cards when I’m shopping at Target. We have a Target Red Card Debit Card, which means we save 5% on specialty gift cards, including Disney gift cards! If you’re purchasing a large amount of gift cards, that 5% can really add up!
Sometimes places like Sam’s Club and Costco will also sell discounted Disney gift cards. If you have a membership to one of these places, keep your eyes peeled any time you’re in there. This is a great way to save on those gift cards!
Combine Gift Cards Right Before Your Trip
The night before we leave for our trip, I’ll get on disneygiftcard.com and transfer the balances from all of my purchased gift cards onto one or two cards. This way I don’t have to keep track of multiple cards while we’re traveling. Usually, I’ll do one main card and then one for Liam that has his souvenir budget on it. He earns money throughout the year doing chores, earning good grades, reading books over the summer, etc, so we empty his piggy bank and purchase a gift card with that money before our trip. Then Korey and I will usually kick a little more onto his gift card, too. ☺️
The other great part about using this site to register and manage your gift cards is that if you lose a card, you can cancel it or transfer the balance to a different card. Life saver! It’s also really easy to check your card’s balance so you can keep track of how much you have.
Disney Rewards Card
Another way we like to add to our food/souvenir budget is by using our Disney Rewards Credit Card. Now, this is a credit card, so you definitely want to consider if this is a good move for you financially. But we absolutely love our Disney Rewards Card! We use the card occasionally throughout the year when we know we’ll be able to pay it off quickly, and we like to put our entire Disney trip on the card before we pay it off. When you charge your Disney vacation package to a Disney Rewards Credit Card, it gives you six months interest-free, though we usually have it paid off well before that. The biggest perk is that such a big purchase nets BIG rewards dollars!
Depending on the type of Disney Rewards Card you get, you get either 1% or 2% back in rewards from all your purchases. We let the rewards build up all year! Then when we want to cash out our rewards, I redeem them by loading them onto a Disney Rewards Redemption Card that we can then use just like a gift card in the parks. It is awesome! We figure, if we are going to spend that money anyway, we might as well run it through the Disney Card first and get those rewards dollars! This works well for us as long as we know we can pay it off before it racks up a bunch of interest!
There are also some other perks of a Disney Rewards Card, like being able to use the code DRVCMEMBER on shopDisney.com for 10% off and 10% off of purchases made at the Disney store. If you’re interested in signing up, you can use my referral link to get a special statement credit with your first purchase.
Surprise: A Giveaway!
In conjunction with this post, and because I’ve reached 25 posts on my blog and 100 posts on Instagram, I’m running a $25 Disney gift card giveaway on my Instagram page! Come follow along on Instagram and check out how to enter the giveaway! 😄
I hope this post gave you some good ideas on how to create your own budget for Disney and a Disney gift card stash! Check out more of my Disney tips and trick here, like How to Save Hundreds on Your Disney World Vacation Package! And don’t forget to pin this post so you can easily reference it later! ❤️
