When you’re getting ready for a Florida holiday the last thing you need to be doing is worrying about how much you are spending or how much you have left! If that’s the case we have a few money saving ideas and budgeting ideas to help you along.
One of the main budgeting things we use is a pre-paid credit/debit card. These are really good way of keeping track of your cash. We used the Post Office one last year and it was great and really handy. Lots of Post Office counters have a Bureau de change now. You name the amount you want on it and they do it all for you. The added bonus of this is that you load an app on your smartphone and away you go! This gives you “real time” account balances, so its really easy to keep track of how much you’ve spent, and the added added bonus is IF you lose the card or it gets stolen they can replace it within 24 hours. Doing this means you only spend what you’ve pre-loaded onto the card, so even if you’ve gone mad in the outlets you won’t get home to a massive credit card bill! (BUT you are able to load extra cash on to it direct via bank transfer if you have spent it all or you are running low on funds).
Attraction ticket sellers will nearly all give you “money off” voucher books with your park tickets. It’s really worth trawling through these little booklets to see where you can use them and how much you can save each sitting. That way you can plan where you want to eat and save. Also as a little side note to this if you do eat out check your receipts, some restaurants put a discount code on them to entice you back with some really good offers. They also sometimes throw in free extra attraction tickets such as air boat rides and entrance to family fun spots and mini golf. Well worth looking through before booking your tickets to see what they are offering.
Disney. Well… there are so many places to eat and shop here its a tad mind boggling, but the park maps give you a little handy quick reference guide to how much food/restaurants cost. Here’s their guide:
$= around $14.99 and under per adult
$$= $15.00 to $34.99 per adult
$$$= $35.00 to $59.99 per adult
$$$$= over $60 per adult. (Yikes)
At least using this guide you are able to budget for the family/party and know what you are spending before you go into the restaurant.
Another little tip we like to use in restaurants is have a look at the portion size while choosing what we want, the reason being that many times we’ve ordered 2 mains and 2 sides and had WAY to much food for both of us. So now we tend to order one main and a couple of sides to share. (The Cheesecake Factory is a prime example – last year, Mrs Oh! Orlando ordered a side plate of sweet potato fries and there was enough for 2 people! Good job there was 6 of us at the table….) Likewise in most places a child’s portion is sometimes more than enough for an adult and sometimes two adults.
Clothing. Now shopping for new clothes/gym wear/shoes etc is what we love, we always hit the outlet malls at the top and bottom of the i-4. These are brilliant for the bargain hunters amongst us. You do save quite a substantial bit of money here, but be warned sometimes a bargain is not always a bargain. Sometimes the discounts are achieved via multiple purchases, so you actually buying things you don’t really want to achieve the discount. But that being said for the canny shopper this will not be a problem if you go shopping with a group and you all chose something. Some of the best bargains we saw there were in the Micheal Kors shop, this was really surprisingly heavily discounted! And if you are quite petite you can’t go far wrong and checking out the kids sizes in stores, these will quite easily accommodate a UK woman’s size 12! Again check your little discount books for money off offers and also ask in stores If there is a tourist discount available.. doesn’t cost anything to ask!
Clothing take 2. When in and around the parks (Disney and Universal ) you’ll be tempted to grab all the merchandise you can see, hold on! Wait! First off when you are at the outlets there is a Disney character warehouse that sells all the last season or nearly the end off the current season merchandise. This can be a treasure trove of items, you do have to do a bit of searching but it’s well worth it.
Now, as for park, character and sports merchandise, stores such as Target and Walmart stock an excellent range. These are official licensed items but with designs that they will not sell in any of the parks and normally quite a bit cheaper. Don’t forgot to look in the official park stores, they sometimes have flash sales selling the end of season merch, or the merch that isn’t selling very well (for example at the moment the Halloween festivities are going on so you know at the end of these there will be heavily discounted items for sale in the shops and outlets.)
Shopping malls, these can be a brilliant place to save money. Generally you will pay less for goods in the U.S. than you would in the U.K. even though the Pound isn’t strong at the moment.. Mrs Oh! Orlando always heads to the Mall at Millenia for her beauty products. The one big saving is her Christian Dior mascara, at home she pays £29, in Macy’s in the Mall she pays $25, so she’s saving right away. Mr oh! Orlando last year purchased a new iPod and a iPad Pro. Oh and a pair of apple ear buds. That was a GOOD days shopping… it was so good his son went and got some ear buds as well! Buying these thing in the U.S. saved us quite a bit with the exchange rate, but also something else to note is if you purchase anything with your credit card the exchange rate is marginally better. And if you do happen to purchase something quite expensive it’s insured by the card issuer.
Also going back to Mrs Oh! Orlando’s shopping for beauty products, she always swears by the shop called “Bath and Bodyworks” lots of stuff in here is multi buy offers, and the quality is amazing. In fact when people know that we are going back to the states they always give us a list of things that we can bring back! (Tiffany)
Walmart and Target. This pair of shops is worth the trip to Orlando. We love taking people around here for the first time! You want a 2 gallon jug of milk. Here it is. Huge bottles of Powerade for 99c. Got ya. (Mr Oh Orlando faves these are. Normally in the parks they are $4.00, IN Walmart and Target they are 99c!!) and its always a delight showing someone the famous ‘yard of bread” literally a loaf nearly 3ft long. But seriously these are the places to come on your 1st day of holiday. We NEVER take any suncream, shampoo or conditioner with us. Why fill your luggage with weight that’s not needed?? It’s all brand names (pretty much like Asda and Sainsbury’s at home) but with the equivalent own brand that is WAY cheaper. And being the sunshine state they know a little about suncream.
As a family when we travel to Florida we tend to be self catering as a rule. That being said we love to eat out as well. The best thing about self catering is the enormous choice of shops you can choose from. We’ve mentioned Walmart and Target but for the Brits going over there now there is also Aldi! Yes Aldi. Now walmart is cheap. You can get a lot of shopping for your money here but we’ve seen a few vlogs from Aldi in Orlando, and boy. It’s is really cheap and its set out just like our Aldi’s here. Happy times for the budget minded family.
For those lucky enough to be staying on Disney property make sure you check out the Disney ding plan. This can get you all your meals and snacks included in the price so although you may pay more “upfront” for the holiday you know that the food budget is taken care of so no worrying about snacks or treats. Now, there is a You Tube channel called “Disney Food Blog” or “DFB” – they always say they are “winning at Disney”. They show some absolutely brilliant ways to maximise the Disney Dining plan and how to get the best value out of your plan there. We love this channel, we highly recommend watching it. (We follow 4 or 5 different channels. The Tim Tracker is our main one and the DFB is our other main go to). Many UK based holiday companies are also offering some really good deals for next year that could save you money in the long run, for example sometimes they offer free Disney Dining plans, so that is another way of keeping the costs down.
Gift cards. Now Disney suggest a good little idea. You can buy a gift card and pre-load it with an amount for someone. Maybe the kids are running around wanting this and that?? Give them a gift card and top it up with say a $100 and tell them they have to manage their own budget while in the parks. That way they will be a bit more canny about spending it all in one go! These cards can be topped up repeatedly, so if you say to them you have $50 per day for “snacks, rubbish and daft stuff” (as our parents used to say) they feel and maybe act a tad more responsibly… also you know just how much you’ve given them and that way you can track your finances better.
Another way of saving cash is that most ticket providers now offer the “memory maker” for Disney in the price of the park tickets. You can save pics by tapping your magic band on the mouse logo and they pop up on your My Experience app. You can get these printed off while you’re there or save than to your phone. We tend to have one or two printed at the parks just to get the special frame but the rest we save to our smartphones and print off later when we are back home, saving quite a few $$$.
We are all about having a great time on holiday, and for some its the holiday of a lifetime – and that involves lots of hard work and saving to get there. But you shouldn’t have to be watching every penny (or cent!). Hopefully these few little tips will help you have fun and maximise your cash while out there.
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