Are all the points charged the same maintenance fee per point across the board?
If you don't mind me asking how much is the monthly or annual maintenance fees for 500,000 points?
And thanks for the info and link.
Different resorts can have different MF costs. Some of the cheaper resorts will have a MF around $4.00-$4.50/1k, while others could run upwards of $7/1k. The cheaper the MF costs, the higher the resale purchase price tends to be.
You should also make sure you look into if you are looking at annual or every-other-year contracts. With Annual contracts you get your points renewed each year, while with the every-other-year contracts you only get points on the Odd or Even years, depending upon your contract. The Biennial contracts can also get you on the MF's since your program membership fee (basically your annual Wyndham Membership cost) is charged every year based off your total contract value..... IE, for a 150,000 Biennial contract, Your contract may show as getting 75,000 annually, but you'll be charged your program few for 150,000 annually.
For anybody else who has any helpful advice or words of wisdom for me. I am looking into buying some Wyndham points and know nothing about it so far.
And tips and tricks?
Is there a chart someplace that shows you how many points it takes to stay certain amounts of time in certain resorts?
Do you need to buy points from a specific home resort or does it matter? Can you use the points at any resort?
Points are points, for the most part, but there are a few exceptions.
Any wyndham owner can book any wyndham resort at the 10month mark. However, from 13-10months you get an "Advanced Reservation Priority" at your home resort. This means that if you want a specific unit size/type, or want to book at a popular time at a resort, Sometimes you may need to factor in the ARP window in which resort you buy your points at.
Examples might include Bonnet Creek during Christmas/New Years week.... or 4bdrm Presidentials.... Or New Orleans resorts during Mardi Gras.... Or even sometimes a Presidential unit in some of the resorts that only have 2 or 3 Presidential units in their inventory.
Something else, depending upon how you plan on using your points, which you'll want to keep in mind is your Reservation Transactions and Housekeeping points. depending on the size of your ownership, you will get so many free "reservation Transation Points", and so Many Housekeeping points. once you run out of either you'll incur some extra expenses. I'm sure the TUG articles will probably go over these in a bit more details.
We would never travel during holidays or summer to Orlando. Maybe to some place else like Tennessee or Las Vegas but I can't deal with peak Disney crowds.
If I were to buy a contract some time soon and it still had 2013 points left on it what would my options be for those points? Use them or lose them? Or is there another option to keep from losing them?
Honestly... I'd personally not count on getting access to any of the 2013 points still on a contract. You won't get any access to the contract as an owner until it goes thru the whole title transfer and Wyndham transfer processes. Wyndham can sometimes take months to complete the transfer on a contract, so those 2013 points could expire before you'd get access to them. If the transfer completes however before the end of the [use]year, then you can look at them as bonus points that you could try and bank with RCI if there isn't a resort nearby you could use them at.
I want to buy a contract with about 230-250,000 points on it because that would get me 3 different weeks at different places (not during high season) and the maintenance fees would only be about $1000 a year. That works out to $333 per week for 3 weeks at my choice (if there is availability) at any Wyndham location.
I looked up completed sales on Ebay and all the contracts under 300,000 points seem to be going for less than $500.
You may be able to rent points for less than $50 a day (which is about what you pay by owning) but I think I would have more control and availability if I had control over my own points.
I looked into DVC for several months. I researched it and researched it and almost bought on two different occasions but something kept me from doing it. I decided I might not want to be tied down to 40 years of Disney vacations. That there are a lot of different locations I would like to see.
And buying Wyndham points is an easy way to do that. They have about 50 (?) resorts in the US to choose from and they all seem to be nice locations. I have been looking at the pictures and none of them seem to be in bad shape.
The maintenance fees for Wyndham points works out to be a little cheaper than DVC for what you get (Points wise) and the initial investment in buying your points is dirt cheap. So I haven't found any down sides yet.
I am mainly searching for info and details on buying and owning. But the actual timeshare boards they don't really want you to ask too many questions. They think you need to find your own info like they had to back when they decided to buy.
There are some downsides to owning at wyndham, such as the fact they are easy to get, but hard to get rid of (hense some of the virtual give aways of the contracts). They also have a tendency to change the program rules in their favor on a semi-regular basis.
You also have to keep in mind the Reservation and Housekeeping points and how to manage them.
And of course... the sales side of the company can be a nightmare to deal with at times.
Honestly, It's a great system to own in if you are prepared and know what you are getting yourself into, but it's something you should definitely take some time to get familiar with before you take the plunge. Timeshare ownership can be a great thing for some people, but for others, maybe not so much. Only you can really make that determination however since so many of the criteria can be subjective to your own situation.
Both the TUG forums and the Wyndham Owners forums would be good location to research and learn about the system. There is information readily available for you to research and learn about the system, but because of it's flexibility, nuances, and complexities, It's really hard for someone else to give you any real specifics or try and teach you about the system without a real sitdown one-on-one classroom type situation.
