Son of Gadsden
DIS Veteran
- Joined
- Jun 3, 2013
Well, my wife and I have made Disney our 'thing'. I'm 23, she's 21, and We've been several times since we started dating 6 years ago. We went for our engagement as well, along with our honeymoon, and her birthday and our anniversary. Our trips have added up to about 6 in the past 4 years. We're also now planning a December trip. We live in VA, so when we go, we stay for 7-8 days. Short trips are not very appealing to us. We have no children at the moment. DVC got to us after this last visit as something we may be interested in. We've done tons of research, resale and Disney...we've gotten the packages, the DVDs, and I have been lurking the forums for weeks. However, I still don't have all the answers I want before we get really serious about it. I'm hoping you guys can help me out with that, and let me know if this is something for me.
We stayed at Poly for our engagement and honeymoon, but that is a bit out of our reach for just the casual yearly vacation. So we tried out AoA this past trip in April. We loved it, and it was affordable enough that we can manage to take two trips a year 7-8 days there. However, an issue arises every time we got to Disney. I have really bad knees from some chronic ACL damage I sustained in my motocross career. I experience pretty serious pain if I do a lot of walking, so we take lots of breaks. The long bus rides back to the hotel and the shear distance are just killer, and I know it'll only get worse as I get older. We're showing no signs of getting bored of Disney any time soon, and I think investing in DVC may be a good idea if it can make Contemporary more affordable, since it would allow Monorail access and make the days more enjoyable.
However, I've heard people say you should NOT finance DVCs. Is this pretty much universally accepted as a bad idea? We've got a mortgage, and plenty of capital in our home.
The thing that had me a little stumped though is the numbers. By my count, the Contemporary runs $450 a night or so at the lowest. I saw a resale DVC of 220 points for contemporary for $17,000. If we used those to go twice a year for a week each....the payments would still be less than what we would pay. Should we go for a bigger package like that right away, or should we go for the smaller packages one by one? If we buy 3 contracts of 30 points a piece, we could combine them and use 90 points on one trip, right?
Sorry if I seem to be all over the place on this. I feel like I have a general idea of what DVC is all about, but you guys here really seem to know a lot about this stuff. So based on what I've said, what advice would you give me? We're alright with staying at AoA for now, but eventually we're going to want to have some shorter distances to the parks, and less use of the buses. Not to mention we plan on having kids in the not so distant future.
We stayed at Poly for our engagement and honeymoon, but that is a bit out of our reach for just the casual yearly vacation. So we tried out AoA this past trip in April. We loved it, and it was affordable enough that we can manage to take two trips a year 7-8 days there. However, an issue arises every time we got to Disney. I have really bad knees from some chronic ACL damage I sustained in my motocross career. I experience pretty serious pain if I do a lot of walking, so we take lots of breaks. The long bus rides back to the hotel and the shear distance are just killer, and I know it'll only get worse as I get older. We're showing no signs of getting bored of Disney any time soon, and I think investing in DVC may be a good idea if it can make Contemporary more affordable, since it would allow Monorail access and make the days more enjoyable.
However, I've heard people say you should NOT finance DVCs. Is this pretty much universally accepted as a bad idea? We've got a mortgage, and plenty of capital in our home.
The thing that had me a little stumped though is the numbers. By my count, the Contemporary runs $450 a night or so at the lowest. I saw a resale DVC of 220 points for contemporary for $17,000. If we used those to go twice a year for a week each....the payments would still be less than what we would pay. Should we go for a bigger package like that right away, or should we go for the smaller packages one by one? If we buy 3 contracts of 30 points a piece, we could combine them and use 90 points on one trip, right?
Sorry if I seem to be all over the place on this. I feel like I have a general idea of what DVC is all about, but you guys here really seem to know a lot about this stuff. So based on what I've said, what advice would you give me? We're alright with staying at AoA for now, but eventually we're going to want to have some shorter distances to the parks, and less use of the buses. Not to mention we plan on having kids in the not so distant future.