Some Disney Adults Are Going Into Serious Debt in the Pursuit of Magic
Jennifer Davidson, a woman in Columbus, Ohio, describes herself as a “mild” Disney adult because she doesn’t have a merchandise collection. Despite this, Davidson has visited Disney World more than a hundred times in the thirty-nine years she’s been alive. “When my husband met my parents, we were in Disney World,” she recalled. “When he asked my father to marry me, we were in Disney World.” Davidson, who now has two young daughters, is a high-school teacher; she also teaches at two community colleges, which her husband calls her “side hustle for Disney trips.” But even with Davidson working those extra gigs, the family currently has more than three thousand dollars’ worth of credit-card debt after booking their next trip to Disneyland, which is scheduled for August.
“We only have so many years where they still want to be princesses and they believe in the magic,” Davidson said, of her daughters. “You capture that moment while you have it, and we can manage that debt right now.” Davidson told me that her family’s’ most recent trip, in September, 2025, necessitated $5,011 on a credit card. They have since been able to pay it off, but Davidson said they have accumulated interest on Disney debt in the past. “That was very, very stressful,” she told me.
Davidson said that she spends more spontaneously in Disney parks than in the “real world.” At home, “I worry about the price of groceries, I worry about the price of gas; I will not spend twenty dollars on a coffee,” she told me. Conversely, “when you’re not in reality, a twenty-dollar coffee isn’t a real coffee. It’s a Disney coffee.” Another teacher I spoke with, who lives in Florida, expressed a similar sentiment: “There’s real-life money and then there’s Disney money. And when you’re in the Disney bubble, it’s like your regular money doesn’t exist.” The Florida teacher, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of judgment from her relatives, said that she is still paying off Disney World annual passes that she had purchased on a credit card two years ago. “I kind of hate that we did it that way,” she said. “But the memories are kind of worth it.”
For the most devoted fans, Disney has engineered an ecosystem of financial entanglement that goes far deeper than park tickets or merchandise, which keeps the magic—and the debt—perpetually compounding. Last year, while on a Disney cruise with her husband and children, Jade Dale, a thirty-seven-year-old who lives in England, bought a membership to the Disney Vacation Club, a time-share program. Dale declined to share the exact cost, but she said that contractually her family has ten years to pay it off. So far, she’s been paying around three or four hundred dollars monthly; she said that her goal is to overpay, with each payment, in order to reduce interest, which is set at nine per cent a year.
