I signed up for the Capital One Venture card and the bonus was equivalent to $500 plus the points to get the bonus made it around $590.

My wife then signed up for the same card. The bonus was even higher when she signed up for the card at equivalent to $750 plus the points to get to the bonus made it almost $900.

The Capital One points could be used on their purchase eraser on travel expenses. I booked the condo through a travel site and bought 4 day discounted Disneyland tickets on Get Away Today for my wife and two kids. My almost three yr old was free. Get Away Today tags everything as a travel expense so the purchase eraser worked.

The key thing here to help my costs is we shared the three bedroom condo with my mother in-law and also my sister in-law and her husband. The condo was great and had plenty of space. So that obviously reduced our costs.

So for the condo and Disneyland tickets I ended up paying a little over $300 total!

My wife also got the Chase Disney credit card. Spend $500 in 3 months and get a $200 Disney gift card. She then referred the card to me, her mom, her sister and brother in-law. That netted her $100 in Disney gift cards per referral. So another $400. Plus my $200 Disney gift card from my credit card. So we walked into the park with $800 in Disney gift cards that we used on food. IT WAS AWESOME! Kids wanted a treat...we got a treat. A couple of treats for everyone each day plus we ate 2 meals in the park each day. We still had money left over on the last day and went into the Disney store on the way out and the kids all got something.

We drove our Hyundai Elantra and got great gas mileage so we paid for gas on travel. We also stayed a couple of extra days and did the beach. Add in our other food costs and we also paid for the maxpass for 2 days and we ended up spending just over $1000 for the trip.

I'm not a lover of Disneyland, but this trip with our kids (two 7-yr olds and almost 3-yr old) was a lot of fun. Sure the parks were crowded but we had fun and got to do everything we wanted to do.