It also dealt some high-cash-flow people I know a real blow. My neighbor is a dentist and just built a beautiful new vacation house. Dentists were absolutely slammed by COVID. So you can have money one day, and not the next. Who would have seen that coming? Now throw paying for a vacation loan on top of that (not saying he did that, though). I would never forgive myself, honestly.
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Oh yes, I know that. And taking a loan out for reliable transportation, and/or to further yourself by getting an education (and ultimately increasing your ability to make a higher income) are appropriate uses for loans. There are likely other good uses, house repairs, etc. But vacation, I just cannot see it ever being a good idea. For one thing, you would have to pay interest, so that expensive trip becomes even more expensive. I hate to give anyone even a dollar more than I owe! 
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especially Disney; right now 
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Yep!
Oh wow, I didn’t even think of DDS. I feel horrible for them. I needed to go and didn’t b/c of covid. They were very understanding but jeez.
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Haha!
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Apparently they’re having a banner year now, from all the deferred care. Yay for them. Ugh for the rest of us!
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A quick note, too - six of us are going in October. But our flights are zero. In certain kinds of jobs, including my husbands, things like FF miles and companion passes are really more than we can get enough time off to use. The two of us together are sitting on nearly 4.5 million ff miles. And we used a whole chunk of them up a few years ago to fly 10 family members to Italy for my husband’s “retirement” celebration - his retirement lasted 4 months. . There’s a lot of people who have jobs that make travel a lot less expensive. (We also have a lot of Bonvoy points.)
Our Disney tickets were left over from a cancelled trip. We always eat breakfast in our room, and often a couple of other meals, so Disney isn’t really all that expensive for us.
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Nice way to make/have some extra magic!
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Yup, I complained about his job a lot over the years, but there were a few benefits! (A lot more now that I’m not sitting home with three little kids, trying to keep them from pitching mac & cheese at each other over dinner, when he would call me from his suite at the Ritz on the way out to dinner!)
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And here lies the rub. It took DH a depressing amount of time to find a job equivalent to the one he lost. From submitting his application to first day of work was more than 3 months, after months of interviews and dead ends. We are going to squeak out of this one okay, but I won’t pretend that watching other people go to Disney on their stimulus money while I’ve cancelled two vacations (one Disney) and bowed out of a girls weekend has been enjoyable.
But that I would otherwise have done those things tells me that I live a pretty good life.
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There are so many ways one can visit, I wish they had broken that down. Some of the lower income folks I work with visit Disney, but stay offsite and go for only a day or two. They use the rest of their time enjoying water activities at the hotel, going to the beach and/or doing other things with family. People bring their own food to the park so they don’t have to eat out. We live in a state within driving distance and it’s common for people of all income levels to go to Florida. I wish the survey didn’t make the assumption that visiting Disney = a super expensive way to visit.
This is off topic, but sometimes I wish there was more validation out there [meaning the folks on social media etc that cover Disney] that these more financially conscious ways of visiting Disney can also be super fun and fulfilling.
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For years, our trips to Disney were just that. There was a time where the only food we would buy in the parks was ONE snack, such as a Mickey bar. We would pack lunches and bring them in with us. We would stay off site in the cheapest condos we could find.
We no longer have to do that…but we did what we could afford. Now, we can afford more, and budget accordingly.
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That was my experience as a child as well. I felt so embarrassed going back to the front of the park and getting our lunch out of the lockers, but every time we would get multiple people stop by us and say “we should’ve done that, I’m so tired of eating chicken strips/nasty pizza.”
I know enough now to know how misguided they were to only be eating at Pizza Planet, or chicken strip baskets, but about 3 days into our trip I started feeling like we were the smartest people on property lol.
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Well, for people there now, the advantage to the brought food is no waiting in long lines. I’d rather eat a sandwich from the backpack than wait a long time for something fantabulous.
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