George Kamel - 18 Minutes of People Going Into Disney Debt

Episode Date: August 21, 2026

💵 Start your free budget today. Download the EveryDollar app!   It’s a tale as old as time. People come to Disney for the magic, but they end up leaving with something very un-magical: Disney debt. So today, I’m reacting to a few poor unfortunate souls whose Disney dreams turned into financial nightmares.    Next Steps: • 🎥 Watch my video I Asked People at Disney How Much Debt They Have. • 📈 Are you on track with the Baby Steps? Get a free personalized plan.   Connect With Our Sponsors: • Go to Boost Mobile to switch today! • Get 20% off when you join DeleteMe. • Go to FAIRWINDS Credit Union for an exclusive account bundle! • Sign up with Privacy today and receive a $5 credit just for being a George Kamel fan.   Explore More From Ramsey Network: 🎙️ The Ramsey Show 🍸 Smart Money Happy Hour 💸 The Ramsey Show Highlights 🧠 The Dr. John Delony Show 📈 EntreLeadership   Ramsey Solutions Privacy Policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It's a tale as old as time. People come to Disney for the magic, but they end up leaving with something very un-magical, Disney debt. So today I'm reacting to a few poor and fortunate souls whose Disney dreams turned into financial nightmares. What can I say except, you're welcome. And thank you!

And what can I say except thank you to delete me? The Pluto to my Mickey, the Maui to my Moana, the Abu to my Aladdin for sponsoring the channel. I would do one more, but the Disney lawyers will be on my tail. Let's get to it. I put my bank card in a magic wand and told my son it can get him anything at Disney. Yikes.

Oh no. What are we teaching these kids? So we went from money doesn't grow in trees to money is invisible and infinite and a magic wand. We'll get it to you. That's crazy. Yeah, very fun. If we did this with like maybe a debit card with a limit

to where the kid runs out of money, like one hour into this vacation. And he's like, Sorry, kid, you're stuck with Mickey ears and a corn dog. Now in Bippity Boppity Broke is the caption. That's actually a good, good caption from Abigail. Thank you for it. But worth it, look at that smile.

I just, people are co-signing this. Oh, this is such a good idea. I'd have to use a prepaid card with my girls though. Put a limit. Kids need to understand, mom and dad worked really hard to save up for this trip, and there's a limit. And there's a limit. We're going to have fun with limitations. We already paid for the travel, the lodging, the tickets.

We can't just go willy-nilly around the parks, hitting our magic wand against stuff. That's like supermarket sweep for kids. And if you're over 50, you understand that reference. My golly, you are right. All right. Well, that's frightening. I don't know how much she actually let him use it, or if that was just for, you know, to get some likes on Instagram. But well done, Abigail, teaching your kid a valuable lesson. that we should all avoid.

My sister and I spent over $100,000 on a Disney Vacation Club contract, and yes, it expires. And we have to talk about it because I know it seems like a wish of money. If you don't know DVC Disney Vacation Club, it's basically Disney's timeshare program. You pay a certain amount of money for a certain amount of points, and then you can spend those points on Disney resorts. You get a certain allotment of points every single year, and our contract is large enough to let us stay for a full week at the Grand Floridian in a two-bedroom villa, which sleeps eight or nine.

There are smaller contracts, and there are way, bigger contracts. But yes, all in all, up front cost, upfront cost, $100,000 for us. There's also maintenance fees, several thousand dollars for 45 years and those will go up in price. Add in those maintenance fees, add in everything. Yes, it's a literal crap ton of money and our contract expires after 45 years. So why would we do this? Why would we do this? The reason we would do this is because for us, DVC makes sense. We're going to go to Disney every single year for 45 years. We've gone every single year for the past 30 years. But We could afford to pay cash. We didn't have to finance it, so there was no additional interest or cost.

Wow. And we know that when we go, we want to stay in deluxe villas, aka the rooms that have full kitchens and multiple bathrooms. That's what makes sense for our family. Does it make sense for your family? Okay, 45 years insane. I mean, they don't even give you a mortgage for that amount of time. But they will chain you to this timeshare that they've labeled with a cooler name. It doesn't make it any better. It's a timeshare, okay? You are stuck with this thing. You can't. get rid of this thing, read the fine print. You will be lucky to try to sell this thing on eBay for $100 to another Disney fan one day. Because she's right. The maintenance fees, all the stuff adds up year over year. It just gets more and more expensive. And if she did go every single year, the math works out to roughly $2,200 per trip over those 45 years. That's a lot of money to spend.

And I understand it's a week. Let's say five nights. I don't know how long they're going. and you're still talking a pretty penny to stay in this place. Now, I'll acknowledge she did pay cash, which I love. And I assume they're doing very well for themselves to be able to afford $100,000 upfront and just slam it down. Can I just show you what that money could have turned into using our investment calculator? This is just the upfront cost. We're talking $100,000 sitting in that investment.

Monthly contribution is zero. They never add to it again. They let it grow for 45 years. Let's go with a 10% average rate of return over that time. We are at. $8.8 million. Just a handful of this stuff would make me richer than the salt. Now, of course, they could use that money every year,

so it's not going to be that high because they're actually withdrawing from it every year to go on this trip. But goodness gracious, why not just pay cash every year you want to go? You're also assuming you're going to go. go every single year for 45 years be able to go get the time off bring the whole family no one's going to have anything else going on by the time they're 42 years old i just think this is a big gamble and you locked yourself in that is scary and a lot of people are financing this thing to the tune of 15% interest and out of a dark curiosity i'm going to see how they're pitching this thing

what the membership costs oh membership can say 50% now you're going wow it's half off what a deal This is crazy. Purchase price, starting at 24 grand for 100 vacation points. Who knows what that even gets you? There's a reason they make it points and not just this many nights. They want to make it confusing. They can devalue the points at any time. That's scary. Closing costs, so it literally is like buying a house. That's really fun. Starting at 500 bucks. Annual dues starting at 70 bucks. Again, goes up every single year. That's just another way they screw you. Oh, it's fun. You can see if you wanted 300, 25 vacation points.

She said the villas. It's only $71,000 up front. I wonder how they even paid $100,000 bucks up front. This is crazy. This is rich people's stuff. And if you're actually rich,

you're probably not even doing this. You're just going to pay outright. You probably have a place nearby, a little vacation home, or you just cover the weekend full in cash and move on with your life. I'm going to say no thanks to this. We spent over $10,000,

on a no-budget family vacation to Disney World to celebrate paying off our house, and here's exactly where all that money went. If you've been here for a while, you know that we've been living on a pretty tight budget as we work to pay off our mortgage. So this splurge of a trip was so much fun, but you know I had to come home, and plug it all into my spreadsheet, stare my spending in the face, and assess the damage and make sure that we weren't absolutely financially ruined. Even on a no-budget trip, I feel like we still did a great job

with spending an alignment with our values. For us, that had us spending most of our money on the deluxe resort. We spent $6,268 to spend $7.9. at the Polynesian. This resort was definitely a flurge, but it had everything we wanted. And honestly, it was amazing and no regrets. We spent $1,696 on our round-trip flights. And those were the cheapest economy seats available at the time. We spent $1,230 on two four-day park tickets, plus an extra $194 to get lightning lanes for each day, which was 100% worth the extra cost, especially with a toddler, definitely recommend getting the lightning lanes.

Our next biggest expense was food. We spent $526 on quick food, $164 on sit-down food, and $420 on three different character meals. We spent $215 on souvenirs between a hat for my husband, ears for my daughter and I, a bubble wand, a candle, a mug, and some bath toys. But we did cut down on this cost by spending $185 on all of the Disney clothes and other merchandise that we wanted to buy before the trip to avoid the huge markup in the parks as much as possible. We also spent 197 on random travel costs like checking our bag, airport parking, and the shuttle to and from the resort. Overall, the total cost of our trip was $11,095, which honestly, like, yes, That is a ton of money. Don't get me wrong, but it could have been so much more.

You're right. It could have been more. That's one way to make yourself feel better about dropping 11 grand in a week. But I do love the premise here. They worked their butts off to pay off their house, which tells me they probably don't have any consumer debt. And now they don't even have mortgage debt. And they're celebrating with a, I'm going to put it in quotes, no budget trip. Clearly, this wasn't a true no budget trip. They had the money sitting and checking. And they just went, you know what, we're not going to like sit here and check off the budget. boxes and track every single little dollar. We're just going to vibe it out, spend out of our values, and get there. So I'm not super mad about that, but I'm not going to do a no budget trip. I want to know ahead of time, what are things going to cost so that I don't get blindsided by any expense?

And that way you know, and if you go over a little bit, it may not be the end of the world if you have some buffer and you don't have a mortgage payment. So way to go, Beconomics, but please don't do a no budget Disney trip for the rest of you. You're not Becca. Stop. We went with no budget and spent $137,000. No, you didn't, Megan. Receipts, Megan, receipts. Live daily, cozy, chaotic stream. I don't like anything about this.

Okay. Enjoying my debt-free life at Disneyland because my debt is at home, not at Disneyland. What? Wow. We gotta love the satire. If we don't laugh, we cry. I mean, Disney is an escape of some sorts.

Maybe it's the job you don't like, the family you don't like, unless they're with you, in which case they're with you. But the debt doesn't leave. Now, maybe your mind has wandered while you're on, you know, space mountain. You're not thinking about your debt payments. But it's back home when you get there.

So for this reason, pay off your debt before you go on a big trip like this. It's going to make it so much sweeter. Because trust me, I talk to people at Disney with debt, and they're just adding to it. Not a lot of people who are in crippling debt who are like, oh, yeah, we saved up and paid cash. Wasn't that hard? it's really hard to save up to pay for any vacation

when you have a bunch of payments already. So get out of the debt first, okay? That's my one ask. But if you're going to make some satire content, he nailed it, he nailed it. Look, nobody wants to think about looming debt when they're booking a magical makeover at the Bip-Bop-Dip-Dootique.

Kind of like how no one really thinks about what's happening to their online data, which is exactly how spammers and scammers like it. But lucky for you, delete me does all that thinking for you. They find to remove your info from villainous data brokers who sell off things like your address, your phone number, to who knows where. Which means less worries when it comes to spam and scam for the rest of your days. See what I did there.

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Start saving on your phone bill today. Go to boostmobile.com slash Ramsey. $25 forever requires customers to remain active on Boost Mobile Unlimited Plan. Back to it. I got my free trial And it ran out And I tried to set the clock back on my phone To three days previous

But Disney was too smart And they knew I was lying about the I was in desperate need of watching Hannah-Mansana And no one had A login for me to use So I may or may not have used my parents' credit card To buy Disney Plus And I just told my mom

that my subscription like my free trial ran over. And now I have free Disney Plus, but I don't. And I don't have $7 a month to pay my mother back. So this seems to be an issue, and I don't want to get a job. You can Venmo me $7, please. This really sums up the state of a generation here. And first of all, what parent is just giving their kids a credit card number, That's frightening, okay?

That's one thing I'll never do for my kid, number one, because I don't own a credit card. But number two, because this is what happens. And I don't want to get a job. Your kid's going to use it, so be ready for those random subscriptions to pop up and be ready for them to never pay you back. I think mom knows that, though.

I don't think she's... It's not her first rodeo dealing with you, okay? She birthed you. She knew what she was doing. It's Sissy Sherrod. Is your name Sissy? Oh, she's an actress. She has an agent.

There's no way. You can afford $7 a month. How do you not have $7,000, girl? 29,000 likes on that comment. See? I'm not crazy. What's your Venmo, sis? I got you.

Girls helping girls. See? This is the world we live in. A very generous generation. I appreciate that. Getting back from Disney thinking you didn't spend all your money. You have $244.44. and 27 cents.

Worth of debt. Oh, you thought you was good. Now, go ahead and cook that. Not manhandling the spaghetti back into the pot. He was about to go out to eat if you didn't catch that. Took me a second. So, he's got the ears. So clearly this guy either went to Disney or at least

was capable enough to go find the ears online. I don't know if they sell them in store. I have no idea. Stop, not you put... Yeah, I hope he didn't eat the noodles. Sounds like they were just like rogue in the sink. I'm not going to his house anytime soon. But listen, $244 in the hole, that would be getting off cheap.

Here's the stat. Families with young kids take on an average of $1,983 of Disney debt. So you did pretty good all things considered if this was a true story. I truly hate when the credit card debt is worth it. Oh no. Pooh holding baby poo? That is cute. They're a little too amused by this.

Disney Magic is just truly something else. You're telling me, I could go stand in the street wearing a Winnie the Pooh costume and hold a mini version of Winnie the Pooh, and people would go, worth it. It was worth going to credit card debt

to see this guy hold a mini version of himself. It's not his actual child. It's not like a reunion from, like, the guy comes home from war to the airport. He's hugging his kid. It's just Winnie the Pooh holding an inanimate stuffed animal. And there's a real dude in there or a woman.

And he's not having a good time, regardless of the smile on his face. He's sweating. He is sweating in there. This is actually making me weepy. I love this so much. What is wrong with you? Winnie the Pooh is so cute. Stop it right now.

This is the cutest ever. I guess I'm just not the target demo for emotion. No feelings. No emotions. Not worth it for credit card debt. Even if I paid cash for that, I'd be like, this is it. Do a backflip or something. Come on, poo.

Overall, it was clear, most of these videos were meant to be jokes, meant to be humorous. And a lot of people are saving up, paying cash for these trips. And of course, there's a handful and a lot of real people out there who are going deeply into debt for this magical experience. But there truly is nothing magical about putting your life on payments and paying for it six months later, 12 months later, at 28% APR just for some memories. So, I fully believe that if you want to go to Disney, you should go. But you should do it with cash on a budget so that you don't have any regrets later on down the road. Enough said. Now we ate our vegetables.

Time for some dessert. Producer Alex has whipped up a delicious video for us to watch to close out. POV, you join the Cyber Truck Owners Club. Send this to that bro. Oh, they did them dirty. Oh, my gosh. I just keep picturing them in the cyber trucks, practicing their routines. Oh, that guy in the front killed me in the plaid.

Wow, guys, I got to admit, when they hit the harmony, I was pretty impressed. Decent singing. But why? And as a Tesla driver, I can tell you, I personally always enjoy videos that make fun of Tesla drivers. So keep them coming. All right, look, I can understand why people go bananas over Disney. It is one of those trips that most people dream about taking, especially if they have kids. And if they don't have kids, I still find it odd.

And if you save up for it, make a budget and pay cash, be my guest. Enjoy your dull whip in Mickey Ears. Also, enjoy this next video where I personally reigned on people's Disney vacations by asking them how to be you. much debt they had. Ironically, in the rain. Just click right here to watch it or use the link in the description. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.