this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2024
39 points (89.8% liked)
Asklemmy
43856 readers
1859 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The worst is it's not even like you buy a share of a single unit to share and keep well maintained, it effectively behaves like a hotel you have a stake in and and get to go 1-2 weeks a year for free and they're usually quite poorly maintained too.
For some reason boomers thought it was a good idea, because gotta buy and own properties. I guess the idea was you could buy a vacation home but for only the few weeks a year you really want it.
It's such a con, if you inherit it from your parents it's really hard to get rid of it too, because nobody wants them now that it's well known to be bullshit. You might as well just rent an Airbnb, it's probably cheaper.
My parents bought one when I was in high school. I was so mad about it. Thought it was a huge waste of money.
Fast forward many years. I was right. Every year you have mandatory maintenance costs (like paying a subscription to keep something you supposedly own). The next part of the scam is that there are tiers of ownership; pay even more to get in a higher tier. Higher tiers get more "points" for booking rooms, and let you book rooms further in advance (12mo out instead of 11mo). If you don't upgrade, all the rooms you want are booked by the tier above you.
On the bright side, my dad is usually able to book rooms on big holidays, and then sell them for cash to cover the cost of maintenance fees. But the time share organization is aware of this practice and is trying to crack down on it, which seems like a breach of contract to me, even within their own scam.
Meanwhile, any time I travel, we just get an airbnb or vrbo and it's always at least 3x nicer for a similar cost, and I'm not on the hook for a bunch of debt and responsibility.