75 DAYS UNTIL DISNEY!!
- Role: Quick Service Food & Beverage
- Pay: $10.00
HOW I SAVE
If you haven’t realized yet I’m a huge planner and I like to be prepared . Remember when you had to do group projects in school and that one person would do all the work and refuse to let anyone else do anything because they didn’t want the project messed up? Yeah, that’s me. I won’t plan an hour-by-hour itinerary for the day but if we plan to leave by 8am, you better believe I am ready and in the car by 7:55. Basically once we get to our destination I am very loose and go-with-the-flow but on the way there I’m the person standing at the door looking at her watch telling everyone they’re late.
This all feeds into how money conscious I am. During the summer I’ll make about $1,000 every paycheck; I always put 75% in savings and 25% in checking. I know Disney is going to be different because I wouldn’t work 80 hours per week like I do at home. At home I serve, work at Lowes, and supervise a restaurant. So my hourly pay ranges from $8.65 to $25 per hour. The nice thing bout Disney is that my pay would be steady, the bad part was that I wouldn’t get as many hours. So I decided to make a budget for myself from a 10 hour work week to a 70 Hour work week. I wanted to make a budget that showed the dramatic end of each side such as if my family is visiting and I take a lot of time off to be with them, or if decide I want to do something fun I might pick up a lot of shifts one week to compensate for it the next.
***What I was not able to put into my budget was overtime. For every shift over 8 hours Disney will give overtime. So if you work 10 hours you’ll get 8 hours of standard pay and 2 hours of time and a half!
TAXES
I wanted to be as accurate as possible with my budget so I found a website that would tell me how much I would make after taxes were taken out of my paycheck (posted below). This is standard for Florida!
https://smartasset.com/taxes/florida-paycheck-calculator#urTBlB5LKh
PERSONAL BUDGET
Yes, I am obsessive enough that I made two different budgets. Click on each link and see which budget fits your lifestyle best!
- Disney Budget
- This is a very strict budget to help me save the most. If I’m having a week at work where I work a lot and don’t have time to get into the parks I’ll use this budget to save more since I’ll be spending less
- Budgeting frivolous
- This budget has a little more leeway. It will allow me to save money and still have fun running around the parks
***Things these budgets don’t take into account:
- Holiday season
- CMs get a 40% discount off merchandise so this is when I plan on buying E.V.E.R.Y.T.H.I.N.G.
- First weeks
- When I’m still moving into my apartment and finding misc. items that need to be bought
When I was making my budget I wanted consistency, so the more I got paid wouldn’t mean the more I spent on gas and groceries so I budgeted $50 for that every week. When putting money into checking (aka spending) I wanted to make sure I had enough to have fun but not to tempt me to be a big spender. For example if I see I have $200 in my account I will spend $190, but if I see I only have $75 in my account I’ll be more conscious of how I spend my money.
I understand that this may not be perfect and may very well change when I get down there (need more or less for gas, don’t spend as much, spend more etc.) but this is a good baseline in still putting money into savings but not depriving myself of fun.
There’s also things I want to do that cost more than what my spending is for each week ie: drinking around the world ($80-$120) and some of my other excurions on my Bucket List and in these cases I’ll take money out of what I’ve saved. Bottom line, I don’t want to deprive myself of fun or forbid myself from doing anything but I really don’t want to leave the program with no money.
I’ll also make a chart which I can keep track of my spending each week. Like what I spend on gas and groceries, or how much I spent in the parks. So if I’m not spending as much as I budgeted for for a couple of weeks I could splurge and do something fun like get a massage at The Grand Floridian!
SAVING BEFOREHAND
At my bank, under my name, I have 3 different accounts.
- Saving
- checking
- misc.
In the past I have never used my Misc. account but thought I would take full advantage of it this year.
This summer I will be going to Iceland for a week with my family, South Carolina for a week with my hometown girlfriends, and Tennessee for a week on my Grandparents boat. With all these frivolous vacations coming up I knew I had to start saving early so I made my Misc. account into my Vaycay account. Starting in February each paycheck I put $200 into this account (minus the time my car broke down). I am currently sitting on just over 1G in this account. I plan to continue adding $200 in every paycheck until I move to Disney. This account will help me not over spend during vacations but since I plan to continue putting money from each paycheck here I hope to have a decent amount built up by the time I get to Florida. This account will be like my backup so that if I ever need to spend more money I can get it from here without dipping into savings. This can also be used for excursions!