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Yeah, my wife and I used a relative's timeshare for our honeymoon. It wasn't a super fancy place, but it was still significantly nicer than your average hotel, and the alternative for us would've been "do nothing" since we were both broke college students.
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Nov 6, 2013 22:37
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razz posted:You should use that to your advantage. Friends/relatives with unused timeshares are the best. My husband and I got 6 nights in a couple REALLY nice timeshare resorts as a honeymoon gift from two friends who apparently have so many points that they can't use them all. I mean, there's no way we could have stayed in places this nice on our own. They were $500+/night 2 bedroom 2 bathroom fully furnished condos. We usually try to hit up the $49 Budget Inn when we're vacationing so it was a pretty sweet gift. Yeah, we just went on vacation with my mom to a crazy nice resort, so it's not all bad. I just can't imagine she's ever going to get 40 grand worth of vacations out of these things. She did put the offer on the table to give us her points on years she can't take a vacation (almost all of them) so that's definitely something we are going to take advantage of going forward.
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Nov 6, 2013 22:47
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I really do think timeshares are dumb. What's the point of pre-paying for a vacation you may or may not take? I'm sure they make sense for people who travel and vacation a lot and know for a fact that they will always do so, but for average middle class people they make no sense.
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Nov 6, 2013 22:55
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razz posted:I really do think timeshares are dumb. What's the point of pre-paying for a vacation you may or may not take? I'm sure they make sense for people who travel and vacation a lot and know for a fact that they will always do so, but for average middle class people they make no sense. Again, outside of the thread, but it lets you identify with the ownership more than just staying in hotels does, which is dumb, but that's how advertising works. No Wave fucked around with this message at 23:57 on Nov 6, 2013 |
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Nov 6, 2013 23:54
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Timeshares are horrible, terrible ideas that are financial albatrosses for 99.5% of timeshare owners. Similar to timeshare chat: I've known people who bought a house with an extra bedroom or two more than they needed expressly for having a guest room that gets used maybe 6 nights a year. It has zero use the entire rest of the year. The incremental cost of buying/owning/maintaining/insuring/property tax on an extra room that gets used one week a year means that you could put your guests up for a week each year in a resort-level hotel nearby. Sort of an extreme example of how when you buy more than you need of [good or service], it gets expensive. Or do what my family has always done: make one of the kids clean their room and sleep on the couch for a week 
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Nov 7, 2013 01:03
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canyoneer posted:Timeshares are horrible, terrible ideas that are financial albatrosses for 99.5% of timeshare owners. Honestly, based on my family, the spare room just becomes a holding container for excess stupid consumer poo poo. Both my parents are solid upper middle class and not even really hoarder-y but people in that demographic just tend to acquire poo poo no matter how big their house is. I think my mom maybe has crossed over into full-on hoarderdom though; the last time I stayed at her house she had all of her shoes lined up obscuring the entire floor of the guest room. I wanted to tell her that when she has enough shoes that she can no longer store all of them in TWO (2) closets and they spill into just "the middle of the floor", it is time to cease buying shoes.
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Nov 7, 2013 01:24
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I don't think having a spare room is an awful idea. Honestly our guest room hardly gets used(14 nights the first year in our place), someday it could be a kids room though (our cat sleeps in that bed right now...). If we would have bought a similar shape 1 bedroom place though we would have paid more in a higher tax area. This house will be easy to sell as well if we decide to move at some point. I have too much house but I also pay less than I was renting and would have to buy a smaller place. I guess I don't see an extra room as bad with money.
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Nov 7, 2013 01:45
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I'd love to have a spare bedroom for hosting couch surfers and my transient friends. I've taken advantage of friends' spare bedrooms many times so I feel like it's pretty important to pay it forward. I think our new place even has one, though we'll see how the configuration goes with a roommate and a possible home office kind of thing.
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Nov 7, 2013 02:04
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I prefer staying with family in a guest room to staying in a nearby hotel. It may be more crowded, but it's also more homey.
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Nov 7, 2013 02:06
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We've got a guest bedroom that we get good use out of. It's especially helpful for when family stays the night, such as when grandma comes to watch the baby while mom and dad go out and have a nice night to themselves. We don't get a ton of use out of it, and it might be cheaper to have people stay at a hotel than to not have it, but I suppose the construction company that built this house 80 years ago should have thought about that one.
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Nov 7, 2013 02:08
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I think you start getting into "bad with money" territory when you buy houses with what are basically ill used in-law units for guests that don't generate rental income. My step family does this; the matriarch of the whole clan owns an enormous house with three bedrooms in the main house and an attached two bedroom in-law apartment that she lets family members crash in. Of course, this is also the woman that got a 400k life insurance pay out from her husband's passing three years ago and has blown most of it on stupid poo poo that doesn't matter that idiot family members talked her into. No, Maria, don't pay off your enormous mortgage! Don't fix your roof that leaks into your kitchen! Don't buy a decent vehicle! Instead, invest in a friend of the family's auto painting business that's already failed once, but an enormous RV from your crazy brother and let your drugged out son live in it in your drive way, three cars that don't run (one of which because she is too cheap to buy a new battery for it and it will likely rust in the driveway graveyard until it's unsalvageable) and continuously replace your carpeting as your herd of lap dogs wash it away in a sea of urine. That 400k was her retirement and she never invested any of it. As far as I know, the devastated remnants of it are sitting in a checking account and she is going to work at the census and beg my father and stepmother to live with her forever and pay rent on the in-law suite she has no use for. My dad may die of an aneurysm just from close proximity to her deluded poor person "spend it on pleasurable luxuries and family before it's gone" mentality.
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Nov 7, 2013 02:31
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Trilineatus posted:I think you start getting into "bad with money" territory when you buy houses with what are basically ill used in-law units for guests that don't generate rental income. My step family does this; the matriarch of the whole clan owns an enormous house with three bedrooms in the main house and an attached two bedroom in-law apartment that she lets family members crash in. I think part of it is that they just don't build many small houses in nice areas, at least in my city.
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Nov 7, 2013 03:21
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OctaviusBeaver posted:I think part of it is that they just don't build many small houses in nice areas, at least in my city. That's probably true in some areas; where this woman lives was formerly an unincorporated county district so it's not the case, there are plenty of modest homes in the area. Though if she had paid off her mortgage and refinance I think I would be in favor of her choice - the giant sprawling house they bought originally for 400k is now worth 1.5 million. However, she now owes more than the original price tag after pulling out all her equity. She used her drugged out sons car accident settlement as the down payment and my stepmothers paycheck for the mortgage for years (until she married my dad and moved out) so I guess SHE at least made a profit.
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Nov 7, 2013 03:32
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OctaviusBeaver posted:I think part of it is that they just don't build many small houses in nice areas, at least in my city. This is me, only "nice area in the city" is "county with decent schools." And even with that problem, but I still overdid it. My house has, effectively, a guest floor. The basement is a walk-out with a bathroom, den, bedroom, and when I get done with there will be a hybrid bar/kitchen in it. The house has enough driveway to park 2 extra cars in it without stepping on anybody's toes. I was willing to take it on with the idea that I'm the oldest in my family, and my wife is an only child. Odds are we will be housing one parent within our lifetime, but probably decades from now. In the meantime, its mostly a waste. I'm setting it up to be an apartment if I want that option, but I have no immediate plan to rent it out. I guess we'll see if it is a truly stupid plan, or just a bad one. The real thing that makes it ridiculous? There's also an extra bedroom upstairs. We use it as an office.
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Nov 7, 2013 14:44
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canyoneer posted:Timeshares are horrible, terrible ideas that are financial albatrosses for 99.5% of timeshare owners. My parents just had to pay someone to take the timeshare off their hands. They were afraid of leaving it after they died to one of us. It honestly seems like AirBnB is the new timeshare. That one lady should honestly just buy a drat Bidet. I bought one for 30 bucks off of Amazon. Best purchase ever.
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Nov 7, 2013 17:55
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I dunno, my parents own a timeshare through the Marriott system. They purchase a "home base" time share,which is worth a base amount of points, and accrue points whenever they stay at a Marriott. The points are transferable, so if they can't stay at their "home base" in say, Arizona, they can stay at any Marriott for free in the world. All because they purchased a Marriott timeshare. Now, I've seen terrible timeshares where you get to use it for like a week a year, then yeah..those are shady as hell. But I've had to change my opinion on the timeshares my parents picked up, it's super nice. When they visited us, we all just stayed in Seattle for free, next year they'll hit like Hawaii or something, and the following we'll hit "home base" with the whole family. Anyone else have experience with these kinds of things?
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Nov 8, 2013 18:26
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I think the issue is that you aren't staying there "for free". You're staying there because your parents already paid for the stay up front. Your parents don't stay at a Mariott for free, they just get their Mariott punch-card punched because they're part of a club that they paid to join. I do think the points-based time shares are slightly less shady though. The one that my husband and I stayed in was a points-based timeshare. The way I understand it is, our friends bought a package for a certain amount of money that gets them a certain number of points to use per year. Some rooms cost more points (like the multiple-bedroom suites cost more than the one-bedrooms), resorts in certain cities cost more points, and certain times of year cost more points. These are also kind of nice because people will sell their extra/unused points for a fraction of what their worth, and you can end up getting a pretty good deal that way. But still, you're pre-paying for a vacation that you may or may not take, since most people don't know what their vacation schedule is going to be like a year in advance. If you're paying $10,000 a year for a timeshare, this is just my opinion, but you'd be better off not buying a timeshare and using that 10K for a vacation that you definitely know you're going to take, instead of paying up-front for a hypothetical future vacation. Also, some of those timeshares fill up FAST. I was browsing the locations for the timeshare our friends let us use, and one of them said you should reserve your room a year in advance. Unless you know for 100% certainty that you can take a vacation during that week a year from now, it's risky. razz fucked around with this message at 20:52 on Nov 8, 2013 |
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Nov 8, 2013 20:49
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razz posted:I think the issue is that you aren't staying there "for free". You're staying there because your parents already paid for the stay up front. Your parents don't stay at a Mariott for free, they just get their Mariott punch-card punched because they're part of a club that they paid to join. Well I don't want to be misunderstood, I didn't mean to say it was "free". They still bought the time share. The thing is that it was modular and transferable. The room my wife and I stayed in was free because they bought a room there. That's a pretty good deal. And I'm pretty sure that if they don't go in a year it all gets put into a points bank. I don't know what the ratio is of points per dollar, but I know they were able to get 4 big suites in Florida because they skipped their stays the previous year. Would it be more efficient as you say? Probably, but I think there is value there in having flexibility. I guess what I'm saying is that this seems a lot different than the time shares we see at resort towns and stuff.
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Nov 8, 2013 22:41
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Jastiger posted:Well I don't want to be misunderstood, I didn't mean to say it was "free". They still bought the time share. The thing is that it was modular and transferable. The room my wife and I stayed in was free because they bought a room there. That's a pretty good deal. And I'm pretty sure that if they don't go in a year it all gets put into a points bank. I don't know what the ratio is of points per dollar, but I know they were able to get 4 big suites in Florida because they skipped their stays the previous year. Would it be more efficient as you say? Probably, but I think there is value there in having flexibility. Well if your parents are happy with their timeshare and think it's a good deal for them, and they get enjoyment out of it, then it probably is good for them! I think the timeshares most people are talking about here are the predatory-seeming ones in resort towns and whatnot. It was funny, when my husband and I were staying in the timeshare, the timeshare people were ALL OVER on the boardwalk trying to sell us a timeshare. They had little booths set up and everything, and would stop us whenever we walked by. We're like "uh we're already staying there!". But I felt bad for those people. 99 out of 100 people just flat out ignore them.
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Nov 8, 2013 22:49
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Jastiger posted:Well I don't want to be misunderstood, I didn't mean to say it was "free". They still bought the time share. The thing is that it was modular and transferable. The room my wife and I stayed in was free because they bought a room there. That's a pretty good deal. And I'm pretty sure that if they don't go in a year it all gets put into a points bank. I don't know what the ratio is of points per dollar, but I know they were able to get 4 big suites in Florida because they skipped their stays the previous year. Would it be more efficient as you say? Probably, but I think there is value there in having flexibility. I still don't see how this is better than just paying for a hotel stay in cash as needed.
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Nov 8, 2013 23:54
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Inept posted:I still don't see how this is better than just paying for a hotel stay in cash as needed. I think a lot of the value comes from the full experience you get at a Marriott. If you've already purchased a stay at a hotel no matter where you are, and it comes with a lot of extras you wouldn't otherwise get, I think thats why they are able to sell them.
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Nov 9, 2013 01:11
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This isn't a sales pitch so I'm going to keep it vague. I spent a few years working for a company with many hotels and (points system) timeshares. I met too many people who really had no business owning a timeshare and were wasting money. However, there were also people who were saving money, too. Many/most implementations of Points allows for banking and borrowing -- so you can conceivably use three years of points at once. Most people either came multiple times per year in short stays, or would do a 2-3 year plan and take bigger vacations; the annual dues were a few hundred for a standard contract, but paying cash directly for the same stay could cost 5+ times that. For people who knew they were going to be visiting for tens of years into the future, this absolutely paid off the initial buy-in, and there were also perks not offered to regular hotel guests. In less quantifiable terms, there was also a lot of brand affinity, and owning with us had a lot of perceived value for the target demographic. For the right people WITH ENOUGH MONEYseriously why would anyone take out a mortgage on a timeshare it was an overall savings.
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Nov 9, 2013 01:43
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Wait you can get a mortgage on a timeshare? 
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Nov 9, 2013 02:47
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FrozenVent posted:Wait you can get a mortgage on a timeshare? You may only get the timeshare for a week, but you do get to enjoy the mortgage year round! What a deal!
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Nov 9, 2013 03:42
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My in-laws bought a local time share in Bar Harbor a while back and go through some sort of trading program where they basically get an apartment for a week wherever they want to go, and I think all they need to pay is a $300 fee for the change. Seems to work out pretty well for them.
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Nov 9, 2013 16:12
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Lyz posted:My in-laws bought a local time share in Bar Harbor a while back and go through some sort of trading program where they basically get an apartment for a week wherever they want to go, and I think all they need to pay is a $300 fee for the change. Seems to work out pretty well for them. Although I'm glad it works for them, remember that any fee/surcharge/other made up reason is on top of what they usually pay for the timeshare itself. That would bug the bejesus out of me.
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Nov 9, 2013 16:43
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balancedbias posted:Although I'm glad it works for them, remember that any fee/surcharge/other made up reason is on top of what they usually pay for the timeshare itself. That would bug the bejesus out of me. Yeah, even when I hear stories about "good" timeshares, it still is never enough to convince me that it would actually save me money. You could rent an apartment or condo for a week without a timeshare. Your options might even be more open if you weren't tied down to the ones the timeshare offers. If it's less than the cost of the timeshare + $300 then you're coming out ahead. Again, if it works for them and they're happy then all is good.
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Nov 9, 2013 23:59
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I don't know exactly, but I think they bought it long enough ago and cheaply enough that it's basically paid for itself already. They seem to do alright getting to where they want to go, and my husband and I used it once to get a pretty decent room with a small kitchen in Vegas so it seems to work fine for them. $300 is still cheaper than what it would normally cost. Speaking of my in-laws, they come so perilously close to being bad with money but none of their plans actually bankrupt them and as far as I know they are doing fine retirement wise so they're not hurting for anything. But I think at one point they owned 5 houses. They carved out a couple acres of their shorefront property, built a cottage with the intent of renting it out and making big bucks on their proximity to Bar Harbor. And then the recession hit and they kind of dropped the ball on pursuing renters so they put it up for sale. They bought a foreclosure to have a place closer to their work, dropped 10k into redoing the foundation - and when my husband and I moved out of it they kind of lost interest in it and let their other son neglect it and let it rot. They jumped on a house in Florida during the housing crisis... didn't get it as cheap as they wanted, but they figured they'd find a renter and it would pay for itself... but they never bothered with that and just let it sit empty (and now my brother-in-law is moving from the foreclosure to that house). It's pretty incredible, but aside from a mortgage that is probably larger than it should be they don't have any other debt. They are already making plans to sell off the two houses in Maine and buy a cabin on a lake in southern Maine... it will remain to be seen if they actually sell the houses before buying the cabin.
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Nov 10, 2013 03:02
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While my wife and I were on our honeymoon we were pounced on by some of those timeshare people, they said "Hey how would you like $100 just to sit through a meeting!" I told them no thanks, I had plenty of money. They probably didn't hear that one much.
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Nov 11, 2013 16:57
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dreesemonkey posted:While my wife and I were on our honeymoon we were pounced on by some of those timeshare people, they said "Hey how would you like $100 just to sit through a meeting!" I told them no thanks, I had plenty of money. They probably didn't hear that one much. Haha, there should be a thread about how to quickly disarm high-pressure sales people. Reminds me of the time they asked me why I'm quitting my gym membership and I told them 'I'm no longer interested in being fit and healthy'.
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Nov 11, 2013 18:18
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Lyz posted:They carved out a couple acres of their shorefront property, built a cottage with the intent of renting it out and making big bucks on their proximity to Bar Harbor. Funny; my wife and I are planning to buy vacation rental property in Bar Harbor within the next couple of years. I'm hemming and hawing on it, I have to admit. Financially, it's a questionable decision because we'd be occupying it during prime rental periods (4th of July week and much of October,) and I'd probably rather pay a property manager to run rentals/maintenance for me since - thus biting into any profit margin I might enjoy. Plus I don't know the first thing about property management, really. CatsOnTheInternet fucked around with this message at 18:31 on Nov 11, 2013 |
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Nov 11, 2013 18:28
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lizardman posted:Haha, there should be a thread about how to quickly disarm high-pressure sales people. Reminds me of the time they asked me why I'm quitting my gym membership and I told them 'I'm no longer interested in being fit and healthy'. I tell all door to door salespeople I rent. They don't bother after that.
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Nov 11, 2013 19:40
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Sudden Infant Def Syndrome posted:I tell all door to door salespeople I rent. They don't bother after that. I just tell them, politely, that I'm not interested and then I shut the door. I need to pick up a "No Soliciting" sign the next time I'm at the hardware store. J-Dubs, Mormons, and sales persons are really starting to annoy me on the weekends.
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Nov 11, 2013 19:47
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Rig up your doorbell to turn on a sprinkler/hose facing your stoop. Tell your friends about it first.
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Nov 11, 2013 19:54
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Jeffrey posted:Rig up your doorbell to turn on a sprinkler/hose facing your stoop. Tell your friends about it first. Gonna get a lot of smashed Amazon packages.
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Nov 11, 2013 20:07
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Sudden Infant Def Syndrome posted:I tell all door to door salespeople I rent. They don't bother after that. This never worked for me with the carpet cleaning people. They come to your house and want to give you a "free" carpet cleaning so you'll want to buy their vacuum. They came over multiple times when I was in college renting a house. I usually told them "You see the carpet in this room right here? This is the only carpet in the whole house. Plus I rent and the landlord steam-cleans the carpet every year anyway". Then they would say some stuff about "saving money" like it would actually save ME money if I cleaned my own carpet instead of the landlord doing it for free because he owned a carpet cleaner. Seriously there was only carpet in one room of the house, it took the landlord 30 minutes to steam-clean it and he never charged us. I would tell them this and they still did not understand why I would turn down a free carpet cleaning. Maybe because I don't want some stranger to come in and move my furniture around so they can clean my 10-year old carpet that gets cleaned regularly anyway? One time I saw an ad for a Kirby vacuum on Craigslist. The lady stated in the ad that she was selling it because she didn't have carpet in her house and never used it. Must have been one hell of a sales pitch to sell a $2,000 vacuum to someone who doesn't even have carpet in their house!
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Nov 11, 2013 20:09
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But you can reverse the flow and use it to paint your fence! I still can't believe this is a line they told me, as if that would convince me to buy it. I unfortunately let them into my house because they had a Forward Guard street team of two girls who went door to door asking if I was interested in a carpet cleaning opportunity. I thought that it was for a carpet cleaning service, so I was willing to entertain them (especially since I was literally vacuuming when they rang my doorbell). Later an actual salesman came by with the vacuum to give me the pitch, and he understood pretty quickly that I wasn't getting it, but asked me to let him finish since he was paid on a per-demonstration basis. Luckily he warned me that his "manager" would be coming by to try the hard close, and that I'd need to be ready for that. I was actually quite impressed by the salesman's frank nature and gave him some tips on finishing his way through college. Hopefully he didn't have to keep that job long.
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Nov 11, 2013 22:38
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Sudden Infant Def Syndrome posted:I tell all door to door salespeople I rent. They don't bother after that. I tell them "go away" (mainly the energy scams) and then shut the door. I wouldn't even go down to talk to them if my intercom was actually intelligible.
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Nov 11, 2013 22:44
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SpelledBackwards posted:But you can reverse the flow and use it to paint your fence! That's hilarious. That would totally destroy everything. Probably including the fence. The people that came to my neighborhood were often rude and pushy. They'd stand with a foot inside the door and practically be in my house when I talked to them, they'd get real close to my face so I'd have to back up and they'd inch into the house. Not cool. One guy actually said "Fine by me, have a nice life" in a sarcastic tone when I told him he couldn't come in my house.
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Nov 11, 2013 22:44
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I asked about this in the FAQ above, but I think it deserves in this thread. My wife works with a friend that had to recently declare bankruptcy. We genuinely were confused as to why this was. She had a decent job working at a large company, had been there a while, and was probably pulling in about $32K. She had no student loans at the time, and was living with a room mate. Yet she always talked about getting help from her mom and struggling to pay for her little Mazda 3. So she ended up declaring bankruptcy. She then thought it would be smart to get that degree, so she found a University of Phoenix program and was going to use her employers tuition matching program and get it paid for. Well, bankruptcy goes through and we find out some more information through social media and discussions with her. University of Phoenix program isn't accredited. No matching on tuition. She bought a $400 clutch from some designer. She bought a brand new, full priced iPhone 5 and iPad. She had got that permanent eye liner thingie done. Constantly had her hair did and colored and stuff. Got a gym membership outside of the free gym offered at her employer. Bought her mom gifts and paid her bills. She said that her bankruptcy lawyer said her bankruptcy went through so anything she gets now won't be counted and will be "wiped clean". I think thats bs but she is TERRIBLE with money. TERRIBLE.
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Nov 11, 2013 22:45
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