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.
That’s a 22.8% savings of the initial outlay, which is a nice tidy sum.
But, what happens when we purchase this year and use a 10% average annual increase?
Yowza. It estimates we’d save almost an additional $1,000 simoleans.
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.