Disneyworld Do-Over

I don’t know if you read my blog “Before I learned to Budget”… but in summary my husband and I were really stupid when we first got married. We were months away from having our first baby. Our income was halved because I was no longer able to work. And we (with no savings) went to Disneyworld with my extended family. This destroyed our finances and we didn’t even have money for groceries when we came back. Well, God has a sense of humor and he recently gave us the opportunity to see if we’d really learned that lesson.

My whole family was planning another trip to Disney (we really like it there if you hadn’t noticed!) and as usual we didn’t really have the money to go. This is really pathetic given the fact that my parents were going to cover everyone’s hotel rooms, the admission, and meal plans for the park. We were only going to have to cover gas money, traveling hotels, and all the inevitable extras. We really wanted to go until we found out I was pregnant with baby number 3. We have a $3500 deductible (of which we’d met like zero).

We felt really awful until my WONDERFUL parents told us their idea. They were still going to take my other siblings to Disney… but how would we like it if they paid for some construction labor and materials!!! FYI we’ve been slowly remodeling the upstairs for over a year.  At the rate we were going we were never going to get up there!  We couldn’t believe our blessings. We said yes and I jumped up and down a lot (as I tend to do when I get super excited). I couldn’t believe how close we’d come to blowing our Disneyworld do-over. This is turning out to be the best vacation I never took!

Fortunately we’re surrounded be well meaning people who aren’t afraid to speak up and give us advice. The difference is that years ago I wanted to appear as if we were financially as well off as everyone else… and we’re not!

 Everyone has different financial circumstances and you can’t compare yourself to anyone else.

Are there any areas in your life where you’re trying to compete with the Jones’? Some good friends of ours told us to stop it, because the Jones’ are miserable!

In all of this we found that the best way to save money on a vacation is to NOT GO!