Alright everyone, because I don't want to clog up the boards with a dedicated thread, and because this will include a lot of rambling and manic explanations of how my brain thinks about things, I figured I'd post it here.
We bought 150 points Oct UY at Poly in Oct '24 (direct purchase). We immediately banked those points forward to Oct '25. We just took a trip with our kids to Poly in March '26, 140 points for 5-nights in a Deluxe Preferred View studio. Before our trip was even over, my wife was talking about how we need to come back in October and bring her parents. Meaning we need TWO studios.
Ok, sounds good, we banked our 2024 points forward to pay for this March '26 trip, so we have plenty to spare, right? Well... not exactly. Because it's our 5-year anniversary this year, and we were planning a return to Hawaii. So we went all out decided to bring our 2 kids on a trip to Aulani. And not wanting to be the sole caretakers of our kids on our anniversary trip, we decided to invite my in-laws. So we spent exactly our remaining balance of points, 310 (the remaining 10 points from '24, our entire '25 balance, and our entire '26 balance), on a Pool Garden 2-bedroom room for 5-nights in May (coming up soon here!).
This means UY '24, UY '25, and UY '26 are depleted. And my wife is eager to head back to Poly in October. Ok, no biggie, we can just borrow '27 UY. This grinds my gears a bit, as I never wanted to get into an "always borrowing" situation, but here we are. Sadly, I need 220 points to get 2 Resort View studios for 5-nights in October '26. Which means I'm 70 points short if I borrow the entirety of my Oct '27 points.
I ended up finding someone in the Rental/Transfer board selling 64 points via transfer. So I decided to buy the full allotment of OTU points for '26 and then buy these 64 transfer points. Boom, I've now booked the 220 point reservation and have 18 points remaining for Oct '27 UY.
This means we are still in the hole. We for sure can't take a trip for the remainder of our Oct '26 UY. We would have to wait until Oct '27 in order to be able to borrow our Oct '28 points. And even then, we're STILL in the always borrow situation. Ahhhh!
So I started digging more, and despite having received a transfer for the '26 UY, I hadn't had one for my '25 UY yet. I thought if I could find someone selling a Dec '25 UY transfer points, that could help me get a March '27 stay taken care of and hold us over. So, without even really thinking twice about it, I ended up buying 147 points off someone selling.
Rather immediately, I started getting some buyer's remorse. I just spent roughly $4k on 211 points--I could have used that $4k towards adding on 25 points direct, which would have given me immediate access to 75 points. Not to mention more points in the future for the length of the contract. Hell, I could have probably found a cheap SSR contract if I really wanted (despite me not really wanting to own at separate resorts).
I realized I was perhaps a little short-sighted in buying transfer points--I don't regret it, I'll definitely use them, but perhaps the money could have been better spent towards another contract. For some odd reason, I was trying to avoid committing to more annual dues, but now that I've had some time to reflect, I really don't think it's that bad.
So I start gameplanning--realistically, I think we have found ourselves in a situation where we want to make 2 trips a year. The trip in March was for our daughters birthday, and the trip in October will be near our son's birthday. So while we MAYBE could do this October '26 trip with my in-laws and call it quits for a year, I feel we're going to be itching for more (damn add-on-itis!!!). So maybe we need to start thinking about how we can actually accomplish two trips a year. This was the primary motivation for buying the 147 transfer points, as I now have enough to book a March '27 stay. But it still doesn't change the fact that if we wanted to do an October '27 stay, we'd still be borrowing from '28, and we'd still be rather depleted come March '28.
Being in Wisconsin, we want to justify the flight expenses down, and we both agree that 5-nights is a nice sweet spot for each visit, although perhaps having an option to do 6 would be nice. I think 4-nights would be the absolute minimum we'd need. By my math, if a 5-night studio stay at Poly in October cost 110 points, and it would cost 125 points in March, I'm looking at roughly 235 points each year. But I'd want to allow some buffer in the event we want an elevated view type (as we loved the Preferred View we just did, and would likely be doing it again if we weren't trying to increase our odds of getting connecting rooms with my in-laws, hence why we chose resort view), or if we need/want to add on an extra night.
250 total points could probably work, and 300 points may be a bit more than needed, but at least 300 points would prevent me from being in a constantly borrowing situation.
I looked and found some 150 Poly resale contracts for roughly $24k. I'm seriously considering it. The cost of direct would be roughly $34k, so it's a $10k difference for the ability to combine all 300 points for a big stay at LSL or Riveria at the 7-month mark--unsure if it's worth it since I'm already
DVC-Y. The more I think about it, the more I realize that if our travel habits will truly be twice a year, we'll pretty much always have to be a Studio family, so I'm leaning more towards "we'll probably never need 300 points at LSL or Riveria and 150 would be fine in the event we ever decided to stay there".
I will say, I want the points to be at Poly and not a cheaper resort, just so I can use all 300 at once in the event we end up in another situation where I need to book two rooms (or even something in the Tower, which seems to be selling out before the 7-month window opens). I'm picky like that, otherwise yeah I'd just buy sleep-around-points at SSR or something.
That being said, this entire ramble is me just thinking out loud. The $4k I spent on transfer points is gone, but they'll be used wisely. But it made me realize that I'm probably in the thick of it with DVC now and realizing 150 points likely just won't cut it long-term, unless we are comfortable scaling back to 1-trip a year. And if anyone wonders, I can say with a high level of confidence that my wife likely has zero interest in exclusively staying at OKW or SSR to make our points go further--she's become addicted to the monorail convenience, especially with kids in strollers. In case you were thinking "Why don't you guys just go to Saratoga in September and Old Key West in January? Then you get two trips on 150 points!"
Damn, DVC has really made me bougie...
. Also we found the one bedroom works better for our family.... also something you may find after owning for a couple years. The kitchen and play area for the kids makes a huge difference for us but we also aren't park warriors. Also those one bedrooms in the tower with the extra bath are perfection. I digress....
