They automatically put a $100 hold on your card on check in day.
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When we had the dinning plan we used our MB but the food was prepaid. One trip DS a growing teen was told, “ eat when you’re hungry, use the MB”. Boy did he like that. He didn’t break the bank but there are stages where teenage boys eat nonstop 
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Tell me about it. I have 3 teenage boys (and a 10 yo boy). Our grocery bills have gotten astronomical. We used to make a meal and have it last 2 days. Have not had that happen in a while. DS18 came home from work last night around 10, ate 3 biscuits, a couple eggs, a bowl of cereal, and yogurt. And I am pretty sure he ate at work as well.
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lol sounds about right 
Let me share with you our MagicBand charging experiences when we stayed at WDW the last week of April. I ran into a few things others have not mentioned yet. Like you, my wife and I too used the envelop method the first years of our marriage. We also love the convenience of using MB’s for purchases at WDW but have struggled understanding the front desk charging processes Disney employs. It seems to be different every time we go there. I use my credit card at Disney (not a debit card) and have it set up to provide me text alerts anytime there is a $100 charge. We did the online check the day before our arrival at WDW and I got a surprise text alert at 2:00 AM the morning of our arrival day at WDW … more than 12 hours before we even arrived in Orlando and checked into our resort. That $100 hold stayed pending on my credit card for a week and eventually fell off. On our 2nd day I got another text alert for a $108 Disney charge. Since I didn’t recognize that amount, I asked about it at the front desk where I learned that my two small restaurant charges on our MB’s plus two days of accumulated resort parking fees added up to more than $100 dollars … so Disney pushed those charges thru to my credit card. At that point I stopped using our MB’s to pay for anything and switched directly to our credit card. When we checked out a couple of days later, my total resort bill was $158 (the original $108 plus $50 for two more days of $25 resort parking fees). Disney processed the whole $158 at that time. A week later the $108 charge dropped off and I ended up having the correct net $158 amount left on my credit card.
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Good to know – thank you so much for adding to my depth of knowledge.
It’s also nice to know someone else who did the envelope thing! We never used real envelopes for daily money at home, but at Disney? Oh, yeah, real envelopes! I even let the kids decorate them when they were little.
It was a very good thing in '98 when we had to add a day to the end of our stay at POFQ. We had been underspending our daily allotments, rolling it over to the next day and building up a surplus. On the fourth day, we went to the AK, which was less than a month old, and it absolutely wrecked us all. (I really didn’t want to go, based on the Unofficial Guide’s advice that new things attract huge crowds, but the promotional flyers and mailers had whipped my children into a frenzy of Animal Kingdom anticipation.) When we got back to our room and the kids crashed for a nap, DH started counting our surplus while I called the front desk to ask about adding a day to the trip. We had to make up for the rotten day! It was magical, really, to add a day and know that it was all paid for because of our handy envelopes full of moolah. 
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Your use of envelops at Disney brings a smile to my face because we sort of do the opposite these days … with Disney Gift Cards of all things. I hate leaving WDW with a big bill to pay after we leave. So, we carefully estimate our expenses ahead of time and load up with Disney gift cards (bought at Sam’s Club for a small discount) using them to pay for things as we stroll around WDW. The trick of course is not to buy more gift cards than can be used, as they are only good for Disney purchases. Having leftover, unused Disney moolah is way worse than a big leftover bill to pay.
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This is great to hear !! You deserve it after this year. Go have a hell of a lot of fun!!
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I didn’t know it was only $100. It seemed to me that they were constantly putting holds on my credit card, higher than $100- but that might have been after the first day?
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To me the MB charges are great. I don’t watch our spending while we’re there because I know about how much we spend per day on a trip to WDW. So months beforehand I look at the the length of our stay and/or our accommodations so that we don’t end up going over what I want to spend for the trip. Shortening the trip by even one or two days would pretty much pay for every extra thing the family might want. Or changing the type of accommodation. I get the big pieces into place so I don’t stress about the little ones.
This may not work for everyone & it may not be very exact, but then we don’t worry about daily spending. I’m on vacation. I don’t want to think about it. If it means a shorter trip, so be it (I think our trips are shorter than average, compared to other Liners- typically around a week). But while we’re there it’s worry-free.
Since I’m the one doing the planning the family doesn’t know anything about the trade-offs. They only know they had a blast for the time they were there!
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Yes. The MDE app will show you your spending. You can also get an itemized statement of room charges
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Another enveloper here - I still use the methodology, but in an app instead of physical envelopes. We’re a cash and carry family also and our trip in April gave me all sorts of anxiety mostly because of mobile ordering. We ended up using a combination of gift cards and the magic band w/ credit card attached. Each night we would go to the front desk and pay off what we had charged that day with cash. It wasn’t a big of a deal as my brain had made it out to be.
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