Vacation Archives - Lazy Man and Money

Travel for Free by Hacking Your Taxes?

September 18, 2018 by Lazy Man 3 Comments

Many personal finance bloggers love to write about travel hacking with credit cards. As you can tell by that link, I’m one of those bloggers who have written about it in the past.

Last year, we had a lot of expenses in renovating some investment condos. It required us to put up a significant amount of money into the projects. It’s money we had in our various emergency funds. My wife and I applied for quite a few credit cards that had bonuses for spending a minimum amount. Most of them earned us the equivalent of $500 in travel if we spent $3000. That’s the equivalent of getting more than 16% back as long as you use the points.

Back then, I would keep track of what all our points/miles and worth. It was around $6,000 which is pretty exciting! It wasn’t all from the credit cards. Some of it was from saving up Marriott points for years at our timeshare. Some of it was from my wife’s work travel.

We used some of them late last year and will use some more this year. We’re saving up a large portion for a potential return to Australia. Hopefully our trip won’t collapse the United States’ Financial system like it did 10 years ago.

You’ll notice that this article has been about my travel hacking last year. Why? We haven’t been able to do it much this year. Many of our expenses aren’t ones that we can pay with a credit card. Our mortgage can’t be paid with one. The kids’ school can’t be paid with one. We don’t pay for electricity due to our solar panels. I like to reduce our expenses on all the other stuff, so there’s often no guarantee that we’ll get to the minimum spending necessary to earn the rewards.

Then I read an article from Joe of Retire by 40. He’s hustling for free travel using credit cards. I’ve been following Joe’s blog for a long time and we have a lot of financial similarities. One of the differences is that he’s paying estimated taxes on his blog earnings. We don’t pay estimated taxes. I’m an employee of my blogs S-Corp (and have taxes taken out as part of payroll). My wife also chooses to withhold a little more money on her day job.

It turns out that you can pay taxes with a credit card. The processing fees vary, but it looks like it can be as low as 1.87%. (Why would anyone choose the other options to pay more?) If you had to pay $10,000 in taxes that’s $187 in fees. At first it sounds like a raw deal.

However, if you are putting it on three credit cards that have $3000 minimum spending, it could earn $1500 back in travel points depending on the credit cards. Would you pay $187 for $1500 in travel rewards? Of course, right? If you are going to travel anyway, that’s $1300 in free money.

I have to admit that I really haven’t looked at changing our withholdings. It’s been nearly a couple of decades since I even thought about how it works. I usually like, “Set it and forget it.” It fits with my whole Lazy Man brand. However, I’m willing to change my ways if it means an extra thousand or two a year in free travel.

I have to admit that I’ve never heard of anyone doing this. (That doesn’t mean it hasn’t been written about before as it is pretty close to Retire By 40’s plan.) Maybe there’s a gotcha that I’m not seeing?

So to recap, here’s the plan to hack free travel with credit cards and taxes:

Increase ~~withholding~~ allowances so less tax is taken out of your paycheck. (Needed a correction there.)
Get a credit card that offers a $500 reward for spending $3000 in the first 3 months. (That’s an example. I’ve seen a lot of these around.)
Use the credit card to send a tax payment to reach the minimum.
Pay off your credit card from the money that wasn’t taken out of your paycheck in step 1.
Repeat steps 1-4 quarterly or as often as you can depending on how much tax you need to pay.
Enjoy your reward bonuses (minus a little in fees for using a credit card) of travel.

What do you think? Does it work?

We Disappeared on an Tiny Island (Summer Hole 2018)

June 19, 2018 by Lazy Man 3 Comments

I hope all the fathers out there reading this had a good Father’s Day this weekend. It’s hard not look at the news headlines and realize that not all fathers had a good day.

We just finished up the two week period between the end of school and the start of summer camp. I call this the “summer hole” because my wife and I are kid care for two full weeks. (Summer hole is a particularly bad name since it isn’t summer and hole sounds bad. Unfortunately, I can’t think of anything better.)

Last year was our first year at our school and it caught us by surprise. The school didn’t really announce, “We end everything two weeks before the other schools, good luck with summer camp that doesn’t begin until then.” My wife didn’t plan to take vacation until late and we weren’t prepared. This year things went smoothly, but we saw parents of children in my youngest’s class (their first time) get surprised too.

The first week started with graduation and school-organized play-dates for the kids. You can laugh about the accomplishment of graduating pre-school, but it is certainly cute and entertaining for parents. We did some local things for a day or two and then it was time for my 20th college reunion followed by our annual trip to Block Island.

College Reunion 2018

There’s a reason why everyone says that time flies and 20th reunions are one of them. I wasn’t a huge fan of my college, but it is hard to argue with free tuition at one of the best liberal arts educations in the country. I did make a great group of friends and it was a good opportunity to catch up with them as our lives have moved in different directions.

The big theme of the party, at least for men was, less hair and bigger bellies. I wasn’t an exception to that. We were all reminded of what we looked like 20 years ago so that others could recognize us.

My wife felt like the school really went all out, which I agreed with. My kids, age 4 and 5, were somewhat excited about the new place, but bored easily.

As my wife says, reunions are odd. If you wanted to keep in touch with people, you probably would. Most of the people I’d want to get back in touch with live across the country and didn’t show up. Even if they did, it’s hard to re-kindle a friendship over such a distance with families moving in different directions.

I wish I had a more personal finance angle to share about this. We stayed only 24 hours because my wife was hosting some out of town coworkers in Rhode Island. That was minor pit stop before…

Block Island 2018

If you’ve never heard of Block Island, you are a normal person. There’s a better chance that you’ve heard of Nantucket or Martha’s Vineyard. Those islands are known for being popular vacation escapes off the coast of Massachusetts. You aren’t allowed onto those island unless you have a belt that has at least two of the following nautical symbols: anchor, whale, sailboat, ship wheel (helm?), lighthouse, sea star (starfish), or crab. Also, it seems like white pants and pastels are part of the dress code.

Block Island is a lot like Nantucket or Martha’s Vineyard, but much smaller. I described it a bit in last year’s Block Island review, but here’s a short explanation: Block Island consists mostly of the city with the fewest people (~1000) in the smallest state (Rhode Island). The island has one grocery store, one bank, and one gas station… and at least 15 beaches and hiking trails.

For us, it has a few advantages:

It’s close to us. We can get to ferry in about 30 minutes.
It’s a relatively frugal vacation. Plane tickets for our family of four almost always come in around $1000-$1500. Instead, we can bring our car and all of us on the ferry for under $100.
We are away form the “dishes.” We can be fully on vacation with no chores and away email messages that say, “We’re on an island with very slow Internet connection. We’ll get back to you in a few weeks.” That’s one reason why we leave one island vacation land to go to another island vacation land.
It’s more mindful travel… I think.
We can bring the dog. It’s become quite clear to me that dogs and planes don’t mix due to airline policies. Having someone sit the dog can be about $200 for 5 days in my area. (I know, I do a lot of dog sitting myself.)

This year we stayed at Darius Inn. That means we avoided the unsuitable, historical hotel with tiny rooms and little electricity from last year. We went from my worst hotel experience to my best. Darius Inn is like a bed and breakfast. The inn keeper made an awesome (if a little bit hippy on the quinoa and nuts) breakfast every morning. There were daily wine and cheese happy hours.

I’ve never been treated so well staying away from home, which actually made me feel guilty. I’m not use to receiving such generous service.

In addition to saving money with the breakfast that was provided, we brought a lot of our own food. With the kitchenette available and the ability to pack a whole car, there was no reason not it. It’s a good savings, because buying from the grocery is extremely expensive (everything is shipped on ferry, so there’s extra cost to that.) The restaurant costs go up from there.

Here’s a little bit of what we did:

Took the kids and dog to the Block Island Labyrinth:

This is a favorite spot of ours. You are supposed to walk around a circular maze/path while you meditate. The kids wanted to run through it. It’s a different type of experience. Even our dog, Jake loved it. He’s like a giant dog on Easter Island:

We also searched for glass float globes. An artist comes to the island to hide 550 glass float globes every year. Find one and you get to keep. Seems like it would be easy, but he makes a few trips over the summer releasing about 75 at a time. There are quite a few people who are obsessed with the treasure hunt.

We thought our kids would love it, but it turned out to be too much walking. I thought for sure there would be a glass float in here:

The weather was rainy for half of our stay, so we spent a little time at the local library. It was literally next door to us at the Darius Inn.

Libraries are doing lots of innovative things nowadays. One day they had a walking book tour. The kids loved walking around reading the book through the various signs.

Unfortunately, my wife got news that she didn’t get the promotion she was hoping for while we were at the library. I didn’t have a magic wand to wave and make things better, but I did find this:

I took an “I’m proud of you!” for my wife and a “Be the change” for the oldest. My youngest got one similar to the “You are loved.”

They library also had a cool honor system program to clean up the island:

There’s some recognizable books in there, right? We booked it forward with a couple of children’s books that caught the kids’ eyes. And yes we picked up some trash, though we had already cleared out quite a bit on our nature walks.

Finally, we got ourselves one really nice beach day:

Then it was time for home.

Father’s Day (or The $11 Milk Shake)

I was going to write a little bit more about Father’s Day, but my dog is getting impatient for a walk and I have a dentist appointment soon.

Quickly, I can tell you that I am now equipped to properly go to Martha’s Vineyard or Nantucket. My wife found the perfect belt on Poshmark.*

After a Father’s Day lunch (me and my wife’s father were the guests of honor), we went on a walk to get some ice cream. I found a BOGO Father’s Day deal at Ben and Jerry’s which I shared with the kids. My wife wanted to try the fancy new milkshake place in town. The drinks look more like Edible Arrangements than a milkshake.

Unfortunately, I had to leave as my meter expired, but I heard later that it was an $11 milkshake. Looks like a lot has changed in the 20 years since I graduated college. Remember when a $5 milkshake was expensive? (Caution, adult language language:)

Question, it’s still okay to reference Harvey Weinstein movies, right?

This brings you up to date on everything over the last two weeks… with the exception of the two days it took to write and publish this.

* This conversation involved my wife trying to explain Poshmark to her sister with an instant classic, “It’s like Tinder for clothes…” Ummm, honey, is there something you aren’t telling me?

Disney World Review (Volume 2)

March 26, 2018 by Lazy Man Leave a Comment

Last month, I wrote how we were hacking our Disney World vacation. This is our second family trip to Disney World as that one was two years ago.

This trip’s “hacking” largely involved four things:

Using credit card signups to get airline miles saving us $1000 in flight
Bringing as much food and snacks as we could
Using my wife’s active duty status for discounted tickets
Using my wife’s active duty status to stay at the military hotel, which is an exceptional value.

(I know the later two items don’t apply to most readers here so I’ll leave all that military stuff towards the end of the article.)

Despite all the discounts and attempts at saving money, we probably still spend close to $4000 for the 5 days we were there. This is a lot of money, especially for someone who has gone on record as not even liking Disney that much. I like to think that this blog has a good dose of frugality in it, but it’s hard for me make that claim when our 4 and 5 year olds have been to Disney World twice.

In my defense, both trips had extenuating circumstances. The first trip to Disney was planned because we had traveling there and we had an expiring week of a timeshare. It all timed up with the kids’ preschool spring break. On this trip, my wife had to be at the University of Florida to fulfill a distance learning requirement and the timing with that was also with the kids’ preschool spring break. The timing also worked out such that she could continue to her annual pharmacy convention while I returned with the kids.

Obviously we weren’t “forced” to go to Disney, but things fell into place. I think we’ll always want to do something during this spring break, because two weeks of staying around the house is a lot. If you have any suggestions of things to do in the New England area (we’d prefer to drive to save money), let me know in the comments. So far the leading candidate is to go skiing in New Hampshire or Vermont, which is less than ideal for me who doesn’t ski.

If it were summer, we’d do our Hershey and Crayola Experience trip in Pennsylvania, but Hershey is closed in mid March. It’s unfortunate, as that trip probably costs only 35-40% of what Disney World costs between cheaper hotels, tickets, and driveability. (Driveability is now a word if it wasn’t before!)

I think we’ll probably take a few years off of going to Disney . This will give us some time to save more money and perhaps bring the kids when they’d remember more and be able to go traumatized for life by Space Mountain like their dad.

In the meantime though, here’s our Disney review (with some bonus University of Florida coverage).

We started off our vacation with a bang… literally. About two minutes after leaving the Orlando airport in our rental car, we were rear-ended. I had been stopped in traffic for about 10 seconds, so it was quite the surprise. Everyone was shaken up quite a bit and most everyone reported some achy backs, except for me. Maybe the steering wheel helped. The person who hit us didn’t speak any English and tried to call 1-1-9 for the police. I called the police myself. After quite some time, maybe an hour, we had the nicest police officer in the world and he took our report. By this time, everyone was feeling a little better and less achy.

He cited her for being at fault. There was miraculously no damage to our car as the bumper did it’s job. I can’t say the same for her car as there were paint chips on our bumper. She told the police officer that her car was already like that which was fine with me.

By this time, we just wanted to get to Gainsville. It was way past the kids’ bed times. Everyone was tired and hungry from the flight and the accident didn’t make things any better.

We got to the hotel, a TownePlace Suite in Gainsville. My wife went to check-in while I got the luggage out of the car. I came in the middle of the conversation, but it was essentially Jerry Seinfeld when he was told they didn’t have a car reservation. They didn’t have the room with two queen beds as we had requested and only had a king bed. This is less than ideal for a family of four.

We were so unhappy with the situation that it took a bit for her explanation that there was a pull-out couch available. Our kids love “transformer beds” and we had plenty of room with the suite. One could say that it worked out better, because the king size bed gave us more room.

Gainsville: Saturday and Sunday

With my wife at her class, I had the kids. Fortunately, my wife left me with a plan. The Florida Museum of Natural History was perfect for kids 4-5. They even had an exhibit called the Scoop on Poop, which explained how people and animals all use poop differently. Most of the museum was free, but the poop thing cost some money. I’m not sure it was worth the $17 for the three of us. If it subsidizes some of the free exhibits though, it is a fine price to pay. The kids were entertained for hours with amazing things like a T-Rex skeleton, but also with many hands-on exhibits.

The rest of Saturday was spent catching up on things like calling insurance companies about the accident and catching up on sleep.

Sunday, we got off to a slow start as well. That’s the nature of the beast with 4 and 5 year olds. My wife once again came through with two tips of things to do. The first, go see the football stadium, should have been obvious. We gave that a shot, but it was closed on Sunday. We got some pictures outside the stadium with a Gator and, of course, Tim Tebow’s and Danny Wuerffel’s statues. I didn’t see a statue of Emmitt Smith, which would have been more impressive for me personally. Then again, I follow the NFL and not college sports.

The other suggestion my wife had was, “buy pants.” She checked the weather and saw that it was going to be colder than expected at Disney. For the most part, the high temperature was 68 with it typically being in the 56-62 range. I was the only one who brought pants. The kids and I went to WalMart and stocked up on whatever I could find on the clearance rack in their size. I found quite a bit for $3-4, but at the register they often rang up as just $1. I got my wife some leggings for $5. It got the job done and saved us from having to pay Disney prices for clothing.

Soon after the shopping we packed up everything and went back to Orlando where we returned our rental and took a car service to Disney. The service allowed us a 20 minute shopping grocery trip, which was very important to saving money while we were on the Disney property. We ended up using only 10 minutes, which was used to get milk, cereal, apple juice, soda, bagels, cream cheese, deli meats, bread, some kid-friendly snacks, some fruit, quite a few Lunchables, and some wine. For a few days our nutritional choices were… less than optimal.

We moved on to Shades of Green which is the military hotel on the property at Disney World. I’d post a picture, but immediately we all trashed the room by throwing our stuff everywhere. For our $155 (cheaper for most military ranks) we got a room big enough for 3 queen beds all next to each other, plus a separate area for the bathroom and closet. The room had two queen beds next to each other and a little dining nook with a place for one more adult to sleep a couch that opens into a single bed.

Disney World: Monday through Friday

We bought 4 day park-hopper pass. If we had more time, we would have gotten a 5th day. However, with Typhoon Lagoon closed for renovations there was nothing else we wanted to do. We also thought that taking a day off would help us get the most out of the other 4 days. If we go back again for a week, we might get the 5 day pass and take two days off.

Epcot: Monday

Monday was Epcot day. There was no great plan to it… that’s just when most of the FastPass+ were available. (This may have been because Tuesday is a lighter traffic day at the Magic Kingdom and we had better options on that day. By default, Epcot, which had many FastPass+, got moved to Monday.)

The first day at Disney World usually takes some getting used to. We had tickets from the military base, but they needed to be converted to usable Disney cards. That means a bit of a line at the ticketing center, which meant that we had to take a couple of modes of transportation from our hotel to eventually get to Epcot. It was about an hour, but that’s much better than the 3 hours it took us a couple of years ago when we stayed off the property. If you have any advice on streamlining this process, I’d be forever grateful if you’d leave a comment.

As I mentioned in my previous post, Epcot is our favorite place at Disney. Because our kids are younger, they take very well Nemo-type of slow ride followed by a huge aquarium. They love being launched into space. They are even interested in learning how plants grow for sustainability. The kids favorite ride had to be “Mission: SPACE” as they got to pretend they were on a real space mission. Best of all, the lines are very short for almost every one of these types of rides.

I would have liked to do the new Soarin’ ride, but the waits were often more than 90 minutes long. The good news that I’m sure it will be around for a few years.

There’s something for parents too. On the other side of Epcot there are various countries to visit with food and drink to sample. I think Maria from The Money Principle would have delighted seeing us dance to the “British Invasion” band with a Pimm’s in our hand. The biggest disappointment here is that you couldn’t get real poutine in “Canada.” Even the Disney employee seemed ashamed of the cheese sauce they passed for gravy at one of the stands.

Magic Kingdom: Tuesday and Friday

The Magic Kingdom is bigger than the other parks. The lines are longer too. Because of this we decided to give it two days.

Our kids are too young for Space Mountain so we didn’t have to worry about the long lines there. We could have walked onto Splash Mountain, probably because everyone had the same idea as us… who wants to be soaking wet when it is 55 degrees outside?

By devoting two days to the Magic Kingdom we didn’t feel rushed. We actually left each day fairly early and fit in all the rides that we really wanted to do.

There were two personal highlights for me. One was being called out at on the Monsters, Inc Laugh Floor. It’s a quick comedy that does an amazing job of being improv and having the cartoons mouths move perfectly with the on-the-spot jokes. I had made myself an easy target by putting my littlest one on my lap. We were a “two-headed monster”, so that got attention. Lots of Rhode Island jokes naturally ensued when they found out where we were from.

The other highlight was our trip on the Dumbo ride. There was a full camera crew there which felt a little odd. We thought it was a celebrity family, so we were trying to figure out who it was. This girl, her mother, and her grandmother rode the Dumbo before us and stayed on when it was our turn. Afterwards the camera crew asked me to stick around for a minute. (“Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up.”) It turns out that they might have gotten my elbow or something in the shot and wanted me to sign a release. I told them it was no problem, but I wanted to know what they were filming. They said it was a commercial to run on their blog. (I haven’t been able to find it, but if you three generations of blondes on a Dumbo ride, let me know so I can look for my elbow.)

There are probably a million Magic Kingdom reviews that are more informed than I am, so I won’t take up too much space here. One thing I can suggest is that the new mobile ordering system is fantastic. We’d order food on the way to a place and have it ready when we got there. It really cut down on the waiting.

The other cool thing that Disney is testing is a playground where kids can play instead of waiting in line. When it gets close to their time, they get paged to get back in line. This was listed as being tested at the Dumbo ride, but it wasn’t open because our lines were short.

Finally, because we were staying on the Disney property (and met certain requirements), we got Extra Magic hours on Friday morning. They are the best thing ever invented as it allowed us to fill in the gaps on all the popular rides that we would have missed because we were very late booking our FastPass+. We were able to do Peter Pan when it was a 20 minute wait until of 90 minutes after the park opened.

I want to share one tip on Extra Magic Hours. They only open some rides during the Magic Hours. Fortunately, they are some of the most popular. If you are looking to do another ride that isn’t open, but does get popular (the Haunted Mansion in the morning for example), it’s best to go as soon as the park opens to the general public. The park will still be mostly empty as it takes a couple of hours for everyone to fill into the park. We hit so many rides that by around 1:30PM on Friday the kids just wanted to go back to the hotel and swim.

Wednesday: The “Off-Day”

We wanted to have one day that wasn’t planned. That way we’d be free to enjoy a vacation of relaxing rather than, “I… must… do… every… ride!” My friend Ryan at The Military Wallet said that Shades of Green had plenty to do without going to the parks. He was correct as there were a few heated pools and the best playground I have ever seen. The kids had so fun on that playground that Disney World itself was boring in comparison. (That really hurt to hear, but sometimes the truth hurts.)

The off day was a lot of that until our reservations for Sanaa in an Animal Kingdom hotel. The “hook” of Sanaa (besides authentic African food) was that you could see the wild animals roam while you eat. Given the option of seeing a Zebra while I eat or not seeing one, I’ll take seeing one every time. We had reservations for 6PM, so we got ready at 4:15 to have extra time with the animals or just to explore the hotel.

Unfortunately, we were given bad information about the buses leaving every 20 minutes and they left only hour. We just missed the 4:30 bus by the time we got there. Sanaa is really out of the way. We probably could have called Disney’s Lyft-partnership thing, but it seems very expensive. We took our chances with the 5:30 bus, which only takes you to Animal Kingdom. From there you have to catch another bus to get to the hotel. It turned out to be nearly a 2-hour door-to-door trip.

The good news is that the food at Sanaa was amazing. Everything was great. We didn’t get a good view of the animals from our location in the dining room though. We were more in the middle of the restaurant instead of near the windows. We finished up dinner around 7 or 7:15, but by that time most of the animals had decided to go back to sleep. We caught our two buses back and got back and I remember thinking that it was a 5-hour trip for dinner. The math doesn’t add up as I’m recalling it now, but it isn’t something we’ll be repeating.

One of the reasons why we went to Sanaa in the first place was that it was one of the few places with reservations available. It seems the rest of the world knew that you need to book dinner reservations at Disney. I think someone told my wife this about 10 days before the trip, so we grabbed what we could. Sanaa seems to have a lot of availability because it is so difficult for most people to get to.

Next time we’ll focus on planning our food and FastPass+ rides faster. We learn something new everytime.

Thursday: Animal Kingdom

We probably should have just slept with the zebras. However at least we learned the important lesson that the buses only run once an hour. We were able to get extra magic hours in the morning. We rushed to the Safari, which is a highlight of the park. Most of the people were rushing to the new Avatar rides. Unfortunately, it wasn’t opening until half of the Magic Hours were over, and the line was already 30 minutes long. We had a FastPass+ for it at 6PM, but if we can get it done earlier, we could cancel it and reschedule another FastPass+ in it’s place. (We also wouldn’t need to stay for 10+ hours.)

I was disappointed that the Safari wasn’t going to work and a Disney employee overheard me and gave us a FastPass+ card for us on any non-Avatar ride. I wasn’t even complaining and here I was getting something for free? Wow, that’s different. We took our card and went off to the Dinosaur Land. The most popular ride there, Dinosaur (appropriate, right?), was only a 5 minute wait. It was my favorite ride in perhaps all of Disney, but my wife didn’t like it. My older child was a little scared, but the younger one wasn’t. We finished out Dinosaur land while everyone was at the Safari and Avatar rides.

By the time the park opened up, the Safari ride was a very short wait, so we practically walked right on. We were able to reschedule FastPass for the Nemo or Lion King show. The card that the employee gave us got us into the other one. We ended the day with the Na’vi River Journey FastPass+ we had. I would have been really disappointed to have waited more than 2 hours for it. The Avatar Flight of Passage is the signature ride, but our youngest was too small, so we’ll save that for next time. We had some petting zoo activities that was more appropriate for our age family anyway.

Disney World: Conclusion

I already mentioned this above, but it seems the three core things to plan are groceries (if you can manage it), restaurant bookings, and FastPass+ bookings. We didn’t wait in any line that was longer than 20 minutes.

With a little advanced planning (and if we knew when the Extra Magic Hours were going to be in advance, which doesn’t seem possible), we might be able to trim the Magic Kingdom to one day. That would give us time to do something like Hollywood Studios. We skipped it this time because last time there wasn’t too much for kids our age.

One thing we know for sure, each time we visit Disney we learn a few new tricks.

Shades of Green: Military Hotel Review

I gave most of the important highlights about Shares of Green above. It’s relatively cheap, very big, and has some great amenities for kids. There was one splash-pad area for younger kids who don’t swim (in addition to the two heated pools). However, it was too cold for the splash-pad to be fun. In the warmer months (or even a normal March), I think the kids would have loved it.

We were staying right near the kids playground which gave us quick access to Evergreen’s which has very reasonably priced pub-food and drinks. For dinners we mostly went to Garden Gallery despite the excellent reviews I read for Mangino’s. The reason: Our kids are very picky eaters and the Garden Gallery’s buffet-style service was ideal in making sure they found plenty of things they’d eat. I believe all the food was tax-free as it is a military property.

There was a small base exchange. The prices were probably not as cheap as a typical exchange, but they were certainly better than a typical convenience store.

One day we had a couple of turkeys outside on our patio area. Another day we had a peacock. We didn’t see any alligators fortunately.

There were a lot of places of Shades of Green that I simply didn’t get to. However, that’s a good thing… I was looking to just save as much money as possible and have a comfortable place to stay.

One of the key advantages to Shades of Green is being on the property and access to the Extra Magic Hours. However, the secret bonus to Shades of Green is that it is a 10 minute walk to monorail at the Polynesian, which means very quick access to the park. We breezed through security, which meant more time for the park. The kids loved the monorail too.

There is a small fridge (think college size) in the standard rooms, but no microwave. While I had heard there’s an area with a communal microwave in the laundry room, we never had a need for it.

After we got back, we learned that other Disney properties honored the military rate for the area. Next time we might look into that as a way to stay at a different place to experience some new things. However, it will be really difficult to beat the value at Shades of Green.

Remember: Use Whatever Motivates You Financially

March 16, 2018 by Lazy Man 5 Comments

I’m at Disney World this week. As a result, today’s thought is going to be shorter than usual. I want to save the deeper articles for a time when I can go into them in detail. It turns out that when you pay a lot of money to go to Disney, the desire to spend that time blogging greatly wanes. I probably wouldn’t be publishing this if I had a normal amount of sleep or active brain cells.

Before I get to the personal finance thought though, I feel like I need to get some stuff out there… perhaps to clear those few working brain cells to carry the day.

I looked at the news a few times and it seems like this vacation is “part two” of the one my wife I and took to Australia in 2009. You might remember that month of September as the one when the financial markets collapsed. Perhaps more personally devastating to me, Tom Brady was injured for the season just a few months into it.

I won’t get too political here, but I do have to say a few things just like I did back then when the financial markets were collapsing. It looks like the game of musical chairs continues with the top positions in our government. It feels like it should accompany circus music or that music from Benny Hill. I’m pretty sure my 5-year old is next in line for a cabinet position. My 4-year old seems to understand school systems better than the Secretary of Education.

That 4-year had an active shooter drill in his preschool class last week. I don’t know how to process that. I’m surely not capable of explaining it it to him. I completed college without a drill or even a thought about gun violence. I understand that times change… hey I just made a Benny Hill reference. It’s just that I don’t know how we can normalize teaching “sorting beads by color” at the same time as what to do when an active shooter is around. It seems like dozens of advanced countries have solved this problem, so I don’t see how it is complex here in America.

In other news, Stephen Hawking died on Pi Day. Ugh. I’m sure that there will conspiracy theories that Bill Belichick killed him because the Patriots gave Stephen Hawking a jersery with the number Pi on it. And to round out the Patriots stuff, they’ve lost some of their best and my favorite players in free agency: Malcolm Butler, Nate Solder, Danny Amendola, and Dion Lewis. That’s a lot of talent leaving the team. So far it doesn’t look like they are replacing that talent with any proven talent. (Update: Yay, Jason McCourty signing! All is good again.)

Phew, imagine how I’d feel about all the above if I wasn’t in such good mood while at Disney World? Yikes!

That’s a lot a of words that don’t have a core focus on personal finance. (However, there’s a lot of hidden non-personal financial motivation in all the above.)

Let’s get to that personal finance thought.

While I was in some line for some ride, I read an article from Our Next Life suggesting that we shouldn’t get discouraged by slow initial progress when looking towards financial freedom.

I couldn’t agree more.

There are some personal finance bloggers out there who have net worths of more than $2 million dollars which mean they have sizable investments. Their monthly reports can show gains of $25,000 very easily if the stock market is moving in the right direction. If you are just starting out, $25,000 a month seems impossible. It’s worth noting that for most of these people, this money is just stuff on paper. They are typically in retirement accounts that are difficult (but not impossible) to access until they are nearly 60 without penalty.

It might also seem impossible to get to $2 million dollars. I think that depends on your own circumstances such as education, income, and financial obligations. Everyone is going to be different when it comes to that.

Rather than focus on those big, difficult-to-relate-to numbers, I suggest you do something different. Focus on growing your net worth in terms of percentage rather than actual dollars.

One of the (few) great things about having a low net worth is that it’s easier to high percentage gains. If your net worth is $20,000 and you save $7000 in a year, that’s more than 33% net worth growth. That’s amazing! Embrace that as a big win!

Those people who have $2,000,000 in net worth usually can’t hold a candle to those kind of percentage gains. They’d have to grow their net worth more than $650,000 to match your 33% growth in net worth.

Sometimes a little change in perspective can be the motivation that you need.

The Ultimate Disney World Hacking Vacation?

February 20, 2018 by Lazy Man 7 Comments

There are millions and millions of people who LOVE Disney.

I’m not one of them.

I’ve got nothing against Disney, but I don’t understand the big draw. What’s your memory of Mickey Mouse? Mine is the Christmas Carol remake and The Brave Little Tailor. If Apple still marketed itself with an Apple Newtown or an iMac desktop from 1998, you’d consider it strange, right?

I know some of you are saying those are fighting words. I actually do like a lot of Disney stuff, but it’s mostly all Pixar and Marvel, which isn’t the Disney that I grew up with.

To each their own, right?

Disney World is different than Disney itself. I went a couple of years for the first time since I was around 7 or 8. I gave a grade of mixed bag, especially since even Make-A-Wish kids had to wait three hours to get in just as we did. (Though some people tried to get them up towards the front of the blob of people as best as possible.)

Despite what I wrote above we’ll be bringing our 4 and 5 year old kids to Disney World for the 2nd time.

We did enjoy EPCOT Center though. There weren’t any crowds and there was a whole sustainability section of the park. Even my 2 and 3 year old (at the time) loved it. And the part where you travel from country to country sampling food and drink, well, that’s a lot more fun at 40 than it was at 7.

Why go back? The kids really did have a great time overall and it’s certainly worth a second shot. The park apologized for the 3 hours to get in and said it’s never like that. From a sampling of friends it seems like most of them agree.

Another key consideration… we are able to do Disney in-style and on the cheap.

Active Duty, Credit Cards, and Frugality For The Win!

Tickets

Due to my wife’s active duty status, Disney gives us a discount. It looks like they don’t make it public on their website, so I’m not sure I should publish the deal. That’s just as well, as my wife went to sleep and I’m writing this in hopes of publishing tomorrow. In other words, I don’t have exact pricing. What I can tell you is that I made a spreadsheet of costs a couple of years ago and it was $196 per ticket. I think that’s a 4-day Park Hopper Plus, silver-edition, with cherries. I honestly don’t know what it’s called these days, but I know the normal price was around $274 at the time.

I expect the prices have went up since then. So let’s call it $215 a ticket or $860 for the 4 of us.

Tickets: $860

Lodging

This is another active duty perk. However, before you shoot me, it’s probably cheaper to stay at other places. When we went to Disney a couple of years ago, we had a week of timeshare that was expiring, so we used that. (That’s also part of the reason why we brought a 2 and 3 year old to Disney World. The other reason is that we were meeting friends who lived in California.) There is a lot of cheap lodging in the area though.

The active duty perk allows us to stay in the park at a military resort called Shades of Green. The price is on par with the very cheapest places to stay in the park (such as the All-Star Sports Hotel), but the rooms are bigger and nicer, up there with some of the premium hotels on the park. In fact, from the Shades of Green FAQ:

How does Shades of Green compare to the other Walt Disney World hotels?

Shades of Green would be comparable to the Disney Deluxe Resorts such as Disney’s Polynesian Resort. We have the largest Standard Rooms on property, and a variety of restaurants, as well.

I’m not familiar with the Polynesian Resort, but Mouse Savers says it would be $649 a night for the time we going.

Staying in the park should be a big upgrade from a couple of years ago. Maybe our wait times to get in will only be a couple of hours? We might also be able to stay later. I heard this is a real thing, but we’ve been so busy that we haven’t done much research. I did some 6 months ago, but it’s long been purged from my memory.

You can look at this two ways: 1) a luxury upgrade from some of the cheapest places in the park or 2) a price discount from some of the most expensive places in the park. I think it’s probably a savings of around $150 a day if you take the later.

We’ll be staying only 5 days due to some other commitments my wife has in the area around the same time.

Lodging: $775 (included taxes)

Airfare

Fly to Orlando from Warwick, RI (PVD) was around $265 one way. I had signed up for a Southwest Credit Card last year and hit the minimum spent (due to some condo assessments) to get 60,000 miles. Southwest values their miles at a flat 1.5 cents per mile (I think). So it was 13,700 for each of us to fly down. So we cashed in 54,800 points to get there.

Southwest requires you to pay for certain flight taxes in cash, so we did have to fork out some money. You’d think I’d have a receipt in my email, but I don’t. I think it was probably about $100 in total.

On the flight back, we found a $190 fare from American. Me and the kids are flying back for $683.37 with taxes/fees. (Note: American gives much better email receipts.) My wife is flying to her next commitment before coming home. That’s partially a business expense, so it’s hard to put in here. However, we could easily presume that she would be coming back with us under normal circumstances. It seems fair to call it $1000… $683.70 + $190 + $37 wife’s American taxes + $100 Southwest taxes.

When it was just my wife and I traveling, things were much cheaper. This is one area where kids really double the cost.

Airfare: $1000

Food

This is one cost that’s difficult for us to dodge. However, it might not be impossible.

One of the great perks to staying at a timeshare was that we could shop at grocery stores and make a lot of our own food. However, we’ll be “trapped” in Disney without a rental car. Shades of Green does have a convenience-type store at the property. I haven’t seen a review of the prices and I’m a little worried that they might be sky high. Even so, it would be cheaper than eating every meal for 5 days. Everything is relative, right?

We might be able to go shopping before we check in, but I’m not sure. I’ll have to review our travel itinerary which is not very organized at this time. If we do have time to go shopping, we’ll have to plan what we buy carefully. The rooms at Shades of Green do have refrigerators, but the standard rooms don’t have microwaves.

I really didn’t know what to make of this. If we don’t shop, we could bring canned tuna and/or chicken, mayo, and make some sandwiches? We can (and probably will) also bring lots of mixed nuts. We could bring some cereal. Just for a fun exercise, if you wanted to be super frugal, what would you bring on a plane for food? Since we are flying there on Southwest, we’ve got plenty of checked luggage space, so that’s not a big concern.

If we do shop, we could buy some deli meats, cheese, milk. We wouldn’t need to think about packing food with us, because we could buy all the things above.

However, as I’m writing this article, I came across a game changer. I was reading this extensive Shades of Green review from my friend Ryan and he says:

“To save time and money, we brought breakfast items to eat in the room before we hit the parks for the day. Each morning I took some microwavable breakfast sandwiches up to the 3rd floor laundry room to heat up for breakfast. This allowed us to save quite a bit of money during our stay, and we were able to get out of the room more quickly in the mornings as opposed to sitting down at a restaurant for breakfast.”

With the possibility of a microwave, we can do canned soups and Easy Mac (kids’ favorite). It’s a mini-fridge, so frozen foods might not work out so well. However, I wonder how bad they’d go if they were still kept at refrigerator tempature and allowed to thaw a bit? It might change cooking times, but I don’t think it would cause a food safety issue, would it?

Here’s another fun question. What kinds of foods would you bring with you into the park? Presume that you aren’t going to bring a cooler to keep food cold.

Now we’ll certainly be eating some meals at the park. We aren’t going to try to pinch every penny. However, the more can we plan quick and easy meals, the more rides we can get on. Also, if I’m eating at a restaurant every meal of every day, I’d probably be sick by the 5th day. I think I’d just eat too much junk, fast food.

I don’t know what to put down for the cost of food. I’m going to go with $400. That’s $80 a day for the 4 of us. This isn’t really a budget, it’s just a guess. It will have to do.

Food: $400?

Adding it All Up

With $860 in Disney tickets, $775 in lodging, $1000 in airfare, and $400 in food, it looks like we’ll spend roughly $3015.

I didn’t include ground transportation because we won’t be renting a car while we are there… except to maybe get there and do the grocery shopping. If you are staying outside the park as we did last time, we had to pay car rental costs too. Those are somewhat reduced by the cheaper costs of the grocery shopping.

There are certainly going to be some extra costs, so it might be fair to add a couple hundred for miscellaneous stuff. I’m not going to try to be perfect, so

Total Disney Trip: $3015

How Does that Compare?

I decided to put together a table of what I thought we might pay if we didn’t hack the flight and/or couldn’t use our military connections. Here is our vacation next two possible vacations:

Expense	Our Cost	Everyone Cost (All-Star)	Everyone Cost (Polynesian)
Hotel	$755	$755	$3,245
Park Tickets	$860	$1,184	$1,184
Airfare	$1,000	$2,000	$2,000
Food	$400	$750	$750
Total	$3,015	$4,689	$7,179

However, you don’t have to trust my assumptions, which admittedly may be less than perfect.

As fate would have it, Money Magazine reviewed 4 levels of Disney World vacations. They crunched the numbers for 4 nights, which is pretty close to the 5 nights that we are planning. I’ll let you read the article, but the conclusions were:

Bare-bones: $3,564
Value: $4,885
Average: $6,360
Deluxe: $9,781

* Note: Some of these are my categorizations of the levels. This was because they put them out of order and “cheaper” doesn’t make sense when the order is changed.

I would say that we are getting a vacation that is closer to Deluxe than the others. Like the Money article, ours is aiming to be 5 days at a premium-level hotel. We won’t be spending near the Deluxe food budget or the $800 on souvenirs and extras. At the end of the day, the Deluxe budget is is worth 3 separate vacation trips with our plan.

This highlights one of my biggest conundrums with Disney. It triggers ALL the happy feelings of saving thousands of dollars. At the same time, it triggers a few of the reality feelings of spending thousands of dollars over a few days. At the same time, I realize that spending money on experiences and family is a better use of my dollars in many, many areas.