Do any of you own a timeshare?

I don’t but my best friend does and has had it for years. The resort is beautiful and the condo is beautiful. The amount of money she has paid out over the years, she could’ve bought a beautiful home near the beach. She only gets to use the place 7 days a year. I think the maintenance fee is over 300.00 a month. Put that with the 700.00 a month she has to pay. Is it worth it? Only you can decide how to spend your money.
Another thing that happened to her was when the housing market tanked, she lost her job and couldn’t sell the timeshare except at a huge loss. I’ve heard other people say that it’s very hard to sell them.

@chyna, you can actually buy many timeshares on ebay for about a dollar. But all you’re buying is that maintenance fee for the rest of your life. They also have “in perpetuity” clauses in their contracts, which means that your heirs inherit the debt.

Like you said, if your friend has paid $1,000/month for 10 years, that’s $120,000.00! Crazy! Unfortunately, once you own one, you’re stuck with it – if ebay and other websites are any indication, you can’t even give them away.

I don’t, but a good friend owns Wyndham and also RCI. I am not sure Wyndham is a division of RCI or vice versa. She is very happy with the amount of time she has, and they use a point system where the amount of time you use, the resort you use and whether it’s week days or weekends all determines how many points you use. In other words she doesn’t have it by the week or weeks, it’s a certain number of points. The points can get carried over and there are all kinds of deals and rules and exceptions. Anyway, she likes it and I’ve been a few times to some of the Wyndhams with her. She, her hubby, their kids and other family members (and friends, like me) all enjoy her time share.

I sold it for about three months. It works, and works well, for some people, but definitely isn’t for everyone. That’s why I quit. I was forced to try to close everyone, whether I felt they would benefit from it or not.

A good thing about Wyndham is the flexible locations and the flexible time/dates.