Would any of you be so kind as to disclose your budget and what that covered?
I had meant to respond to this and, well, I was in Disney, so, you know.... priorities. But now I'm back at work, so, you know.... priorities.
Initially, someone said below that it is all over the map and that is true. We have DVC so the room doesn't cost me any money at all. I pay the annual dues once a year and am good for the year. Also, we have the high end annual passes because we go twice in a calendar year and sometimes 3 times. So I didn't "pay" for tickets to the parks for this trip. However, my passes also cover all the extra stuff that a regular park pass doesn't have like Park Hopper, golf courses, Disney Quest, water parks and all the other extras that you get with our pass.
So taking the room and park tickets out - our room costs me about 500-600 a year. When we go and don't have any points, we either stay at Pop Century to keep costs low and or find a deal at a better resort. You can find Pop room rates anywhere from 85-250 a night depending on the time of year. Park tickets are expensive but they get cheaper the more days you are there. My annual passes cost me just under 2 grand for a family of 4. I think a day pass in EPCOT is like 90 bucks plus you have to pay for parking which is 18. We get free parking. Of course if you bus in there is no parking.
For this trip we had all the above. We budgeted $3,000.00 for all the money we would spend. All of our meals (we pay cash) whatever extras I bought for the kids stuff like that. We also drive so we have to budget for gas and food on the trip down as well as a room to stay if we can't make it all the way down in one shot as it is 18 hours for us. I usually will tack on an extra 500 for that to be safe. So all total for us to drive down there and do our thing is about 3500.
We bought Tables in Wonderland so that added some cost but paid for itself two meals in. I added a place while we were there because, hey, Disney. I also added the Christmas party while we were there because, again, hey, Disney. I bought the kids way more stuff than I usually do because it was just an awesome trip. All told, in looking at the bank account, I am out of pocket close to 4 grand. Without the money for the park tickets and room because, again, they were already paid for. I think I good estimate for us would be about 5000 to 5500 if we had to buy them as well or if you want to take a percentage of their cost and add it to this trip.
Again, though, that is will paying cash for meals. We've done trips where we stayed at Pop for a week and had the free dining and I can almost swear that we kept our budget at 2500 for the week and hit it without problems. You can go frugal (relatively speaking) down there and be ok. Honestly my wife would have a better idea at the exact raw numbers but I bet I'm close. If you ballpark yourself from 2500 to 5500 you are fine.
But making a Disney budget is actually easy. The menus for all the places are online with their costs. So you can literally plan out exactly how much you are going to spend on meals. The room rates are published so you can do the same there. If you are flying or driving you already know how to budget for that. About the only thing you can't budget for are the extras - toys, clothes, souveniers, and stuff like that that you will buy - and if you are like me, eating and drinking around the world you have to factor that in as well and that can get expensive. I would say this - get the menus, get your travel costs and estimate your room and tickets. That will give you your absolute hard cost bottom line. FRom there, depending on your family, add 500-1500 for the extras and you should be fairly close to a reasonable idea of best and worst case scenario for a budget.
Of course, you can just go hog wild down there and drop 10 grand before you realize it if you want to. Professional photo pass shoots, boats, special events, going all out at the restaurants more than normal, eating and drinking everything you find, buying your wife the $3,000 purse and watch set that she wants at MK, and on and on and on. At the end of the day when you sit down and just look at everything you get and experience down there, the cost is very competative with any other week long vacation. Hell, I took the family to Boston for a long weekend and spent over a grand without blinking an eye a few months ago. And Disney has a billion more things to do and see.
