We’ve stayed deluxe on almost every trip since we first took our son in 2001. I am a teacher and my husband is an IT consultant. We have stayed at most deluxes, but we started with the GF. We loved the theming and thought that for our first trip as a family, it was the perfect place. The CMs treated us like gold all week—-upgrade to Club level, super friendly and efficient service, lots of attention paid to accommodating our son, who has autism, great character meals...everything was perfect. We felt our first trip was so special that it became hard to imagine doing Disney any other way. When we can’t afford the GF, we book less expensive deluxes, but the GF is our favorite and their excellent customer service has never failed us. Also, I feel that DH works his butt off most of the year, he should have as much vacation magic as possible.
However, there are some characteristics to our trips that have made them a little more affordable. Typically, we don’t stay more than five days and one of them may be pool or water park only. That’s plenty for us. We also travel during August to celebrate our anniversary. You can usually find a room only discount in August. We used to buy the maximum length non-expiring park hopper plus passes from AAA. By purchasing these, the cost per day was lower and, since our trips are shorter, we would always have leftover, cheaper park passes for our next trip. Unfortunately, Disney no longer has the no expiration option, but we still have some park days left from these purchases plus something like seven water park admissions each. When DS was little, we did do some character breakfasts, but now we eat a counter service breakfast and two of us will split the biggest platter since we are not that hungry in the morning anyway. We eat counter service for lunch and save the splurges for dinner. We also have the Disney Chase Visa and use the points for at least some meals. (If you want to finance a trip to WDW, the Disney Visa has 0% financing for six months on Disney vacation packages. We used this for a
Disney cruise once.)
As for transportation, we usually combine a Disney trip with a visit to family in Clearwater, so we need to rent a car, but frequently use Hertz or Avis points earned from my husband’s travel for work instead of paying cash. Airfare from where we live in NY to MCO isn’t terribly expensive,so I usually won’t use airline points because I can get better value for them going farther away. However, because we visit family first, we often fly into the Tampa airport which is usually cheaper than MCO. If you plan on renting a car no matter what, the drive from that area to WDW isn’t bad and may save you a couple hundred dollars . Flying to JAX is even cheaper, but it is a much longer drive.
Those are the little things we do to save money, but I have to say that we have been very lucky and blessed to be able to visit as often as we have. We’ve missed the last four years because I have been extremely ill, but I’m healthy now and looking forward to our next visit.
But we did some googling and found out that is just way too low for us to live the same (we own a condo, two cars, two dogs, like to go out to eat a few times a week, nothing special) that we have here in Atlanta. I was offered a job in Washington DC - same thing. It was more money on paper but actually a 20% pay cut, and that was if we lived way out in the suburbs. I've resigned myself to the fact that we're staying here for the foreseeable future but it's sort of okay because I'm still close to Disney!
