The Disneyland Trip That Wasn't

We had an opportunity to go to Disneyland… in No-Spend September over Labor Day weekend… when we are supposed to be focusing on paying off debt, and we were going to take it.

My sister and her family have annual passes to Disneyland. Their passes had a promotion that would have allowed us to purchase 1 day passes for $109 instead of the regular price of $185 each. Gas would have been covered by our gas envelope, just barely, and we planned to do food super cheap. We were going to bring breakfasts, lunches, and snacks with us and only eat dinners out.

Even so, we figured it would still be nearly a $1000 weekend.

Then, we asked my mom to give The Husband and The Kids their Disneyland tickets for Christmas. That would have saved us $330.

We figured gas at $150. Hotel at $300 ($125 per night/2 nights, plus taxes and fees). My ticket at $109. Lastly we estimated 2 dinner meals out at $100 ($50 per dinner).

Even working the trip as frugally as we could we were looking at $650.

And we were going to do it.

We haven’t been to Disneyland in 5 years and an opportunity to go, at a discounted price, fell into our lap and we were ready to jump on it!

I know that wasn’t the smartest financial decision but that goes back to where getting out of debt meets life.  This was life. We really struggled with the decision of whether or not to go but finally decided the opportunity was too good to pass up. After a few days and several conversations we committed.

But then again, life had other plans.

The same day we finally committed, The Boy came home from football practice and told us he had practice on Labor Day. He didn’t know what time, but the coaches said it would be earlier than normal. First of all, we (wrongly) assumed there wouldn’t be practice on the Monday of Labor Day weekend. Secondly, we figured even if there was, we could be home in time for a 3:30 practice. We would just leave Southern California early in the morning. But, no. There is football practice. At 8:00 in the morning.

Clearly these football coaches have no life! J This is how the post came to be titled “The Disneyland Trip That Wasn’t”.

The upshot is, we are staying home and saving money and not taking a trip during No-Spend September. The downside is we aren’t going to Disneyland. L

This will enable us to pay off more debt than if we went because we either had to funnel money from debt repayment to our trip or we would have had to transfer money over from savings to pay for the trip.  It also keeps us in-line with our goals for No-Spend September.

Of course I wanted to go to Disneyland, but I’m trying to see the silver lining. In the long run, this will be better for us and when we are debt free (someday) we’ll be able to take a multi-day trip to Disneyland and not have to worry about the money.

Happy Labor Day!