Sorry! I am in Los Angeles, CA.
How do timeshares work? Where can I look into for the best choice?
6 Responses to “How do timeshares work? Where can I look into for the best choice?”
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basically, you pre-buy 1 or 2 weeks, the same week, at a resort.
Then, if you don’t want to use it, you can try to “trade”.
The downside is that you have to pay taxes on the property, plus maintenance fees, plus RCI fees to trade -
people buy them all the time, because they can “write them”off on their taxes – but I fail to see the financial aspect of it – since every time I go on vacation, I can watch the sales and do better than the $250 / night + a time share ends up costing.
Typically a condo or some other type of accomodation in a resort/vacation area, you are purchasing – along with others – the opportunity to use the place for a certain amount of time per the contract, which runs for a number of specified years.
If you have a resort area in mind, you should go to its website to find out if there are timeshares for purchase. There are a variety of brokers which may offer a number of timeshares, but you may want to try the resort’s websites to get an idea of what’s available before looking into brokers.
I’m not exactly positive on how they work, but get Hilton Grand Vacations Club. With that, you get a membership with RCI, the largest timeshare company in the world. My parents have HGVC and we can stay practically anywhere in the world for free! The only downside is that with HGVC you need to pay a maintenance fee every year.
For example, my family went on a vacation to Aruba a couple of years ago – for free! We used the timeshare and stayed at a hotel for a week. As for the flights, we just used our Delta SkyMiles from American Express. The only things we had to pay for were activities and food (I think we paid for the rental car, but that could have also just been miles).
Get one. They’re absolutely worth it. They may seem expensive at first, but they pay off in the end.
We bought a timeshare at Lake Tahoe. You can buy high season (most expensive), mid season or low season weeks, meaning you own the condominium for one week out of the year. You can purchase as many weeks as you like. My wife and I purchased one week, so every year we can spend 7 days there for a minimal cost of use tax and a cleaning fee. After purchasing our timeshare week, we went there every year for about 3 years in a row. It was nice, we had the lake to play in, the casinos and entertainment at night, and if we took our week in the winter, we skied at Heavenly Valley, a short half mile away.
The timeshare cost us about $9K, including interest. It took us 7 years to pay for the timeshare at $110 / month. Year after year the maintenance fee goes up and we don’t use the condo much anymore. The maintenance fee for this year was $450. That has to be paid every year whether we use the condo or not. So, unless you’re sure you want to spend a week every year at this same place, I don’t think it’s a good investment.
If you can’t spend a week there, you could “bank” your week with a vacation broker like RCI, International, which costs you money to do, so you could have two weeks the following year, or trade your week wherever you own your timeshare for a week in a comparable timeshare in Hawaii, for example. That’s the theory anyway, but you will find like with everything else, unless you’re really diligent, the good ones are always taken and unavailable.
Hope that answers your question.
Time Shares are for suckers.
I don’t know anybody who is happy they got one.
I do not know where your location is so this may be tough.
However time share brokers like RCI have load and loads of location where you can use your entitlement.
Basically a time share is a plan where you pay a certain amount of money and that gives you accomodation for a period of time, usually way cheaper then getting hotels.
However if you are in US you may want to take advantage and buy a time share package from other countries that have good exchange rates compared to US.
E.g Malaysia where i am at, I paid 25k for a time share package that allows me 3 weeks of usage a year anywhere in the world via RCI. That is valid for 20 years. I can accumulate or sell to my friends or others. If i wanted extra i have 50% discounts.
So if you are in US 25k of local currency would cost you aprox 6.2k USD. And that is good for 20 years and each year you get 3 weeks of accomodation free. What ever the inflation rate is.
So in a nutshell you get to see the world for 300 bucks a year for 3 week aprox. for the next 20 years. Thats 10 bucks a day. A steal by any standards.
Hope this helps.