Another quick update for later: If anyone plans to start using credit card rewards for trips, now might be the time to start the ball rolling. I need to crack open my spreadsheet to figure out timing:
Chase Sapphire Preferred has upped bonus reward to 80K points:
Still has the original 50K points for $4K spend in 3 months, but now you also get 30K more points after you spend $20K in a year. Chase Sapphire Preferred Credit Card | Chase.com
There is also a business card (if that applies to you) that has a sign on bonus of $500 if you spend 3k in the first 3 months. No annual fee. It’s a new offering, but won’t apply to certain people.
Thanks! I’m going to resurrect my spreadsheet from last year and go over all of the options I had in there, including the Ink business card etc. I’ll post a run down and try to make a simpler summary of it all…
This is great information! Anyone with experience buying tickets through MVT? Wondering if these are coded as travel on these credit cards?
I think there is always the chance of some odd gray zone, but I think in general any TA should be coded as travel for rewards cards. I have read on the Barclaycard travel forums when there was an issue with things not coding correctly, people were able to call and have the charge assigned correctly, but of course that could be hit and miss.
Here’s a good Points Guy post on the Chase travel coding that might help. Also, he also briefly mentions it regarding the Barclaycard Arrival in this post.
This thread is a couple of years old, but is probably a good place to pin the video I’m pasting below…
I’ve wondered how much money I might save by purchasing several APs now under the assumption that Disney will keep raising prices every year. So, I created a spreadsheet! (Go figure.)
My sheet lets you enter the number of APs to buy, the estimated annual price increases, along with your savings interest rate to determine how much interest you would lose by using the money now to fund your crippling Disney habit.
You can then tell the sheet to start using APs at some year in the future - a summary table at top will tell you how much you’d save (or lose maybe) with a fistful of APs.
Caveat: My sheet assumes you buy a new AP every year and doesn’t factor in renewal costs, because that would get ugly fast on the spreadsheet front. This is just a fun mind problem, after all.
Also, I assume anyone doing this would be using cash on hand rather than any funds earmarked for long term investing that might earn a much higher rate of interest.
You can play around with the sheet here.
Plus - if you act now (or later even), you can watch my rambling 10 minute video on how to use the sheet! At no cost. (Except for slowly decaying brain cells, maybe.)
Here be the video…
https://jjt.page.link/BuyAPsAdvance
So, while driving in today I started wondering about this tactic and how much lost interest it would take to kill the advantage of pre-purchasing the APs.
So, let’s assume we’re being a little proactive and are going to purchase 4 AP vouchers now, then start using them in 2022.
(Estimating annual AP price increase at 6%.)
If your cash was earning 1.5% in your bank account, you’d have saved $1,185 in AP costs, missed out on $273 in interest, for a net savings of $913.
I may need to start socking a little cash away for some retirement APs starting 9 years from now!
Isn’t the discount pretty significant when renewing your AP, vs. buying your first one? I suppose that’s not guaranteed, but all your other assumptions are based on past reality. It would be an interesting exercise to figure out how many years ahead you’d need to buy your vouchers before your planning ahead outweighs the built in discount.
Oh, sure - renewal discount is pretty substantial and would eat away at the savings, for the near term years anyway. But, it you were buying several years out inflation would jump even that renewal rate up too.
But my thought experiment ignored that - more of a what if you didn’t actually renew every 12 months, but every 15-18 months? Thinking about people who often have gaps in time where they don’t go so can’t renew.
Maybe one of these days I’ll create a modified analysis with your idea! 
OK, Time for an updated sheet!
This new version of my AP Pre-Purchase Model lets you select the years in which you are going to use the AP vouchers to get a more accurate estimate of how much you’d be saving buying them now at the current price and using them in later years.
I also added a new summary table that compares whether just buying one AP voucher now and using renewal pricing for subsequent years would be cheaper than buying multiple vouchers to start.
Important: that renewal comparison table is only valid if you select sequential years to use your APs.
Often people use APs that start more than 12 months apart, or perhaps alternating years.
When that is the case, renewals won’t be an apples to apples comparison.
Below a super quick summary image of how to use the sheet - followed by a video I recorded to talk people through it. Hope you find it useful and/or fun!
You can play around with the spreadsheet itself and try your own variations here.
Whoops, realize that because I moved things around, some settings couldn’t be changed in the sheet. I fixed that now if anyone tried to play around with the model and couldn’t. Sorry! 
Posting this here for posterity: I turned this idea into a post over on the Touring Plans blog.
Nice TP Blog post! Great to see other Liners continuing the tradition of turning Forum posts into Blog posts.
Now that we know the pricing for the new Incredi-Pass replacement for the Platinum AP, I’ve massaged my pre-purchase sheet a little.
In the previous version there was a little bit of an error in calculating the averages over time - not sure why it didn’t occur to me, but in the table where I recorded the AP increases if there were more than one increase in a year I listed them both on their own line,
For example, in 2018 there were two increases: 9.0% in February and 5.3% in October, for a total of 14.3% for the year. However, my summary table just ran a simple average of all the values instead of accounting for multiple smaller values. *headslap *
When I combine them to make a more apples to apples annual tally, that juiced up the average increases.
So, right now here is what the annual pass increases look like over various amounts of time:
As I wrote up my blog post on the idea, I tried to be conservative on my guesstimate of Disney’s annual increases moving forward, as well as generous on the income that could have been earned by keeping the money in savings until later. When making the case for this idea of buying APs now to save money later, I didn’t want to oversell the possible savings amount. Boy, did I not oversell it.
I used 6% as a middle value for annual increases - you can see from that table I no longer think that was a good estimate. Even the 20 year average is more than 8%!
So, let’s see what happens when I use the new Incredi-Pass cost (adding in the $99 PhotoPass charge to make the current pass more similar to the Platinum Pass) and use a more realistic 10% annual increase moving forward.
But First, A Caveat
Now, just like the stock market, stating an average does not mean that we will see that number this year, or in fact, any year. The average is not the number you experience in a given year, but what you get as time rolls on.
In many estimates, I like to use median values - but the current median for all years is 5.4% and includes a lot of low % from long ago that I don’t think we’ll experience again for awhile (if ever) - unless this whole new Incredi-Pass-Genie-Lightning-Laneification explodes into a mass of pixie dust and churro crumbs and park attendance falls into a hole.
Back to the Programming
So, in the name of my own guesstimation I’m going with an average 10% annual increase moving forward - which is STILL less than the 10 year average. You may think differently, but even if you think it less - I can’t imagine the average will be much less than that at this point.
In my blog I used an example where I purchased 3 annual passes in 2020, the used the first AP in 2022 and the subsequent ones every other year after that. Assuming the old 6% annual increase and generous 1% savings account earnings, my sheet estimated a net savings of $887 when buying the vouchers now as compared to purchasing each AP in the year I used them.
But, what happens when we purchase this year and use a 10% average annual increase?
In fact, even if you are more optimistic and only use an 8% annual increase (which is less than the 20 year average) - the savings STILL go up by $500.
This plan is looking better to me every day. If only my kids didn’t want to go to stoopid college and I had some extra cash lying around. 
You must have had a busy day. I was expecting this post hours ago 
Darn work messing with my Disney again.
This is always the problem it seems.
Another update: I added the new AP types & prices to my AP Bridging Estimator. That one is designed for people who already know they plan to bridge tix and want to have a screen shot of the math they might expect at GS.
Anyone new to that sheet, be sure to click on the Quick Reference tab at bottom for some tips on how to use it. This all assumes bridging tix to AP continues to operate as it did before, may The Mouse allow.
If you fill in the “I already purchased Memory Maker” section and amount, does that add $99 onto the AP cost to add to the pass when upgraded?
If I pre-purchase Memory Maker it is $169, but it is only $99 to add it on to an AP. Theoretically, if GS allows that into the equation it should add $70 onto the total cost when upgrading. Yes?
I hear what you’re saying and I should probably add some check boxes for people to select what add-ons they are going to get with the new APs.
But that “I already bought MM” section was to address the scenario when people paid for MM before their trip and were hoping they would get that pre-purchase price credited to their upgrade. Granted, I think it was a relatively uncommon thing and CMs did not necessarily offer the credit from what I heard.
But, I added it due to a couple of requests.
Thinking I might retire that now and just add the simple add-on boxes. But then I have to figure out how to make it obvious you don’t need to by PhotoPass for all the APs in a family/friend group and maybe even let people enter how many PP add-ons they want as opposed to just charging for 1 or for all in the group.
I’ll think about it for awhile
