What does grocery shopping have to do with Disney vacation planning? It’s simple: the less you spend on groceries, the more you will have available for your vacation! There are many ways to maximize your discounts when shopping at the grocery store.  I won’t go into the many ways of using coupons to lower your overall bill; although couponing is a great strategy to take advantage of, it’s not our area of expertise.  I’m talking more about the methods of using credit cards or purchasing particular items to save money that you can later apply to a Disney trip.

One of the big methods to achieve savings is to purchase gift cards at grocery stores to drive up the amount of “fuel rewards” or “fuel perks.”    Fuel rewards are issued by grocery stores and allow you to get a discount on fuel from a gas station store chain (Shell, Exxon, etc.) or from their own fuel pumps if the grocery store has a gas station associated with it.  Sometimes buying gift cards count towards these perks and sometimes they don’t.

The program we are familiar with is the one offered by Giant (and less so, Safeway).  For each $100 spent at the Giant grocery store, you can earn 10 cents off per gallon for the fill up (up to 35 gallons).  We don’t have a car that takes quite that much fuel, but I understand you can fill up gas cans as well to push your usage up to that 35 gallon level.  Once you fill up, the fuel perks are used up and you have to earn more.  Giant imposes a limit of $2.20 off per gallon.  We’ve never accumulated that many fuel perks, maxing out at about 40 cents per gallon.  Ten gallons in the vehicle saved us $4.00.  That’s 1% ($4 off $400 purchase).

So, how do you maximize these discounts?  Find a credit card that gives you a higher discount at grocery stores, and use that credit card to buy gift cards to stores where you get a lower or no discount.  This strategy provides a few extra percentages in discounts and drives up your fuel rewards.  A few gift card types come to mind immediately:

• Buy Disney gift cards to pay for your trip or to load a Disney Vacation Account. – Sadly, Disney announced the closing of the Disney Vacation Account program on July 25, 2017.  They are no longer available for use. 
• Buy Target gift cards and use those to get another 5% off with the Target 5% Discount
• Amazon, restaurants, department stores, gas stations, airlines, and hotel chains are some other gift card possibilities.

We only buy gift cards for stores that we would shop at anyway.  By using a credit card that rewards us for grocery store purchases (more than for using it at that establishment), we maximize the rewards we will receive.  For example, the Chase Freedom card sometimes offers 5% cash back for shopping at grocery stores.  We definitely use the Chase Freedom card to our advantage and combine it with the fuel rewards to maximize our benefit. .

 

* Please follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Email!