Here’s something you may not know about getting your Annual Passes: You won’t immediately get Magic Bands. First you will need to get the My Disney Experience App to link your account with your new passes. (Or you can do it online on the WDW website) Then you will be able to order your magic bands. You can choose a color for each person and enter their name that you want inside the band. They personalize them (your name is on the inside of the band) and mail them to you. Ours took about a week to arrive.
As we discussed in my last post Disney passes will cost you. A lot. For the four of us they were a little over 3k. We are paying most of that monthly but still. That’s a good size chunk of money.
I’ve heard tales from others who moved down to Orlando that couldn’t afford passes for a while. I can totally see how that could happen. Moving in of itself can cost you, much less this extra stuff. But how much would it suck to finally be here and not be able to go in the parks?
So, let’s talk money,shall we? Pretty sure that’s socially taboo. Or maybe that’s politics. Whatever…we’re all friends, right?
If you are like me, when you first begin packing you will think to yourself, “Why on earth do we have so much crap?” Well, this is a perfect time to start getting rid of stuff.We started about three months before our moving date. When you are deciding what to keep and what to get rid of remind yourself (often) that you will be boxing up and loading/unloading/storing/unpacking all this stuff. Make sure you really want it. Looking back I wish I’d gotten rid of more than I did.
Take this opportunity to sell anything you can. We sold a ton of stuff on Craig’s List. Anything that isn’t worth moving (like the kid’s trampoline and bikes they are outgrowing) or anything that may not fit in the new place. Because we were downsizing (remember how I’m working on simplifying, right? Along with a bunch of other stuff…) we also had some furniture that either wouldn’t fit or was just too over-sized for where we were going. We also sold some stuff on Ebay as well. Mostly outgrown girls clothes. We pooled the money together from everything we sold and set it aside for our passes. Over the three months we saved enough to get them. It worked out well and helped us all be more willing to get rid of things remembering that it would go towards future Disney fun. I’m sure there are lots of other great ways to save, but I wanted to share with you guys what worked for us.
We now have our Magic Bands hanging by the garage door so we always know where they are. Plus they make me happy to look at. 🙂 (I know. Don’t judge.)
Also side-note: those stick on hooks are da bomb y’all. I have used them for everything!
