If you love theme parks and you move to Orlando what is the first thing you want to do? If you said GOÂ to those theme parks you would be right! If you have imagined yourself moving here, you no doubt saw yourself dropping off your belongings and heading into your favorite park to celebrate.
Wahoo! We did it! Let’s par-tay.
Sounds fun doesn’t it? It’s a shame reality tends to intrude on all the fun stuff. In actuality, before you can actually go to said park, you will need a ticket. And of course, you will want to get Annual Passes because you intend to go a lot. And you will want to take advantage of those Florida resident discounts. And surely they will take your word for it that you live here now, right? Yeah. It’s a whole thing. You will need to think ahead on this one. It took me a while to even find the proof of residency requirements on their site. Here’s the link so you won’t have to search: Residency Requirements
If you have your Florida licence all ready that’s all you will need. If not, you will two things your current license/ID and a bill or mortgage dated within the last two months that has your Florida address on it and your name. Note that a lease cannot be used for this. Now where we went wrong is here: you will need this document for each adult buying a pass. So if you brought a bill with only the husband’s name on it (like we did) then only he can buy a resident pass. Each of you need to be on it. So after realizing that we ended up just running to DMV the next day and just getting our Florida Drivers License because that quicker at this point.
To get your Florida License you will need to bring every document of importance that you have ever owned. You’re welcome. 🙂 No not really. But it will feel like that. We brought our current license, our social security card, our original birth certificates and our marriage license (not totally sure if we needed that last one but we brought it anyway). And plan to wait a bit. (Waiting? At DMV? Surely not!) Here’s the link to the Florida DMV info.
After we got our license we went and got our Disney World Annual Passes. There are several options for passes. Here’s the essentials: The Platinum Pass gives you access to all four parks, free parking, no blackout dates but NO water parks or golf. The Platinum PLUS pass gives you the water parks and golf along with everything else. There are also cheaper options that will include blackout dates that basically mean you can’t go during any holiday time or school break time like Spring Break or most of the summer. Getting those blackout dates will save you about $110 bucks each. We decided for our first year we are going for the big one: Platinum Plus with water parks and everything. We figure we will see how much we use it and decide next year if we needed that one. One of the best things about being a resident is they let you make monthly payments with no interest or fees. To get the Platinum Plus you will pay $110 up front and about $55 a month per person.
Here’s the official price chart for resident passes: Florida Resident Passholder Program. In my next post I will tell you about getting your magic bands and some tips to saving up for passes.
