a little advice about time shares

 

 

We bought our first time share sometime in the late 1980’s from RCI, after taking advantage of a free stay at a resort in French Lick, Indiana. We later made a return trip to the same resort a few years later with my wife’s sister and her husband. At the time, RCI sold red, white, and blue weeks, which essentially created the “pecking order for how you could book your vacation. We bought the cheapest version, the blue week. Although it allowed fewer choices about resort availability, we did manage to enjoy some nice vacations that we would not have been able to get to otherwise. Two that I remember were Helen, Georgia and Manassas, Virginia.

1997 was the year of our 25^th anniversary, and we were able to book a stay in Myrtle Beach, Virginia. While there, we bought ANOTHER time share from Wyndham, which owned the resort that we had booked. The difference between RCI and Wyndham was that Wyndham sold points rather than colored weeks.

When you buy a timeshare, you put down a down payment, and pay monthly maintenance fees after that. Eventually, Wyndham purchased RCI, and the very last vacation we took (in Sedona last year) was arranged through RCI. Ironically, it was compensation for the fact that our Wyndham vacation at Oceanside, California was cancelled due to COVID, and the year before it was cancelled because the resort resurfaced the pool and the hot tubs just before our vacation was going to start.

The last vacation that we used our Wyndham ownership for was in Tucson, when we stayed at a resort short drive from our home in December of 2021. That stay convinced us that it was time to get rid of our timeshare. (Our RCI membership had gone away at some point when other expenses meant that we could no longer afford the monthly maintenance fees.)

 We are all familiar with the horror stories of timeshare exit companies, so I did some research in order to find one that was reputable. This was AFTER I contacted Wyndham and offered to sell our time share back to them.

I never got a response.

Ironically, the time share exit company actually helped us get out of our timeshare for FREE, even though they shot themselves in the foot in doing so.

My attempt to sell the timeshare to Wyndham was an effort to recover some of the original $10,000 purchase price from 1997.

I won’t tell you the name of the time share exit company, but I WILL tell you two critical mistakes they made:

1)    They reminded us that time shares have nearly zero value.  The link below will take you to eBay listings for timeshares for sale. You could purchase our time share in Myrtle Beach for $2, and a timeshare in Maui could be had for $584 – as long as you were willing to pay the maintenance fees.

 

https://www.ebay.com/b/Timeshares-for-Sale/15897/bn_1858924

 

2)   All time share exit companies charge a fee to kill your timeshare. A few comments made by the timeshare exit company made me suspicious, so I decided not to use them. At one point, the representative said “fine, now you are going to be stuck with Wyndham’s exit program.”

At that point, I contacted Wyndham directly, and discovered that they have a program called the Certified Exit program. Using the program, we were able to terminate all of our future fees FOR NO CHARGE, and all charges ended last October. We did not get any money for our timeshare, but I no longer have to pay $87.80 a month for the maintenance fees.

 I was an Economics major in college, and I was a financial advisor for 5 years when I worked for MetLife, so I know a few things about finance.

 Just as there are MANY time share exit companies, there are also plenty or people who are financial advisors.

One of those is Dave Ramsey.

I know a few people who use his advice, but after listening to him once for a few minutes, I realized that he was little more than a snake oil salesman, and my opinion was based, in part, because he sounds a lot like Rush Limbaugh.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/dave-ramsey-promoted-a-timeshare-quick-fix-his-listeners-called-fraud/ar-AA1c5q5r

For years, radio host Dave Ramsey told listeners how to get out of timeshares — which he says they shouldn’t have signed up for in the first place. The evangelical Christian financial guru repeatedly told his millions of followers to use a timeshare-exit company.

“I never could find anything until I found this company called Timeshare Exit Team about three years ago,” he said in a December 2018 segment. “We started endorsing them, and I’ve had so much fun” bothering timeshare companies, he said.

Now, 17 of the podcast and radio host’s listeners have filed a $150 million lawsuit against him, alleging that he played a role in defrauding them of millions of dollars when he promoted a timeshare-exit company that did not get them out of their contracts.

Ramsey was allegedly paid as much as $30 million from 2015 to 2021 to endorse Timeshare Exit Team, which collected $200 million from clients — many of whom were his listeners. Reed Hein & Associates, a Washington state-based company that was under the name Timeshare Exit Team at the time, received $70 million in fees from Ramsey’s customers, the lawsuit claims. Reed Hein & Associates went out of business after settling with Washington state for more than $2.6 million in a lawsuit over allegedly deceptive business practices.

The lawsuit from 17 listeners in Washington state and California, which was filed April 28 in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington, is seeking $150 million in damages. The Ramsey listeners said the host engaged in negligent misrepresentation, unjust enrichment and violation of consumer protection laws when he promoted the company that cost his listeners while he profited from their financial heartache. The lawsuit also names his company, the Lampo Group, which is now known as Ramsey Solutions, and marketing company Happy Hour Media Group as defendants.

The plaintiffs’ lawyer, Greg Albert, questioned many of Timeshare Exit Team’s alleged claims to customers in a statement to The Washington Post.

A review of the link above also lists some of the other questionable acts of Ramsey, including the time that he told his listeners to “pray away” COVID 19.

Like everything else, the purchase price of a timeshare has risen over the years. The timeshare that we bought in 1997 would cost more than $50,000, and you would still have to pay monthly maintenance fees.

Truthfully, I don’t regret the purchase we made in 1997, since it allowed us to enjoy some great vacations that we would not have had otherwise, and it even made it possible for my sister to spend a week in Hawaii for no cost (other than airfare). However, now that we are older, and Sharon needs a walker to move around, timeshare ownership no longer made sense for us – so we pulled the plug.

One final word of advice.

If you want good financial advice, don’t listen to Dave Ramsey.