Yep I suspect we'll be the same, here’s my data point:
So, the past two years we’ve gone to Disney we’ve stayed once at an Art of Animation 1BR and once at the Disney Springs Drury Plaza Hotel 1BR. The
DVC contract we purchased in June was for 135 points at the Polynesian with 135 banked points from 2022. I’ll compare the DVC purchase with staying at the Drury, AoA, and an equivalent Poly room.
Instead of renting them out, we’ve decided to spread those bonus 2022 points out across the first 5-7 trips to get a few extra nights each time. At that point we may already own more points (what’s it called again addonenza? addonrona?
). I’m using a generous 10% investment rate and a 4% inflation rate for both DVC dues and hotel rates. I’m also assuming annual trips.
We have a trip coming up in January, so I’ll use that timeframe to look up prices. The 135 DVC points gets us 6 nights in a Poly Deluxe Studio with a lake view.
Today’s rates for a 1BR Drury for the same period comes out to $1,609.80. Accounting for additional expenses of staying at the Drury (i.e., cost of a rental car, resort parking, and theme park parking, less the cost of the car service we’d use to get from airport to Poly) adds another $475, for a total of $2,085 for an equivalent trip.
Disney is currently running a 25% off promotion which puts the Art of Animation suite at $3,126 and Polynesian Deluxe Studio at $4,322 over the same period.
Obviously, there’s many ways to compare these: total cost, present value of costs, opportunity cost of using this money for vacations (e.g., what could have accumulated if invested at 10%), time to break even. I’ve summarized some metrics for each alternative in the table below. The first row shows the total costs without considering the time-value of money (scoff). The second is the present value at 10% of those costs. The third and fourth rows show the accumulated value @ 10% if you had instead invested all of the money spent on vacations at the 10- and 20-year marks, respectively. The fifth row shows the accumulated value of all those invested funds after 42 years…wowza on the compounding am I right?! Finally, the last two rows show how many annual trips until DVC pays for itself.
| DVC | Drury | AoA | Poly |
| Total Lifetime Cost | 174,682 | 307,925 | 461,740 | 489,808 |
| PV @ 10% of Lifetime Costs | 42,415 | 40,554 | 60,812 | 73,776 |
| 10yr Opportunity Cost FV @ 10% | 80,435 | 47,918 | 71,855 | 95,225 |
| 20yr Opportunity Cost FV @ 10% | 245,485 | 194,715 | 291,978 | 373,980 |
| Lifetime FV (2066) | 2,436,183 | 2,329,288 | 3,492,815 | 4,237,447 |
| DVC Breakeven Abs Costs (No TVM) | | 14 trips | 7 trips | 5 trips |
| DVC Breakeven @ 10% | | Never | 12 trips | 7 trips |
At a 10% discount rate, the Drury wins out with a present value of just $40,554 for a lifetime of vacation accomodations. DVC comes in just slightly higher at $42,415. The Art of Animation suite is 50% more with a PV of $60,812, and the same room at the Polynesian comes in at a whopping $73,776.
You can think of the last row of the table (Breakeven @ 10% interest) as the amount of time before you would run out of money if you had instead invested the DVC costs at 10% and drawn upon that balance to fund vacations. The chart below shows the same and is my personal favorite to slap in someones face who condescends to ask, “Why didn’t you just invest that money?”
View attachment 806950
Now some may cry foul about my comparison of a Poly studio to 1BR suites, but harkening back (shoutout
@pkrieger2287 ) to my economics classes from college…the utility my family gets out of staying on property far exceeds trekking in every day from a larger room at the Drury. The Poly studio edges out the AoA suite as well for us given it’s a deluxe monorail resort (MK is my daughters’ jam for the foreseeable future) and that's ultimately why we went the DVC route.
A thousand things can and will change between now and 2066, but everyone has their own process for evaluating DVC for their family and I suppose this is mine. I know I’m not the only nerd that finds this stuff fun!
