First Buy In - 50 Pnt Contract - Thoughts?

[Littlelulu01]

Nice! One year pay-off! That's the way to do it!

Thanks. I really wanted to purchase poly but can't get the same quick payoff and think I would need to purchase a lot more points to make it work.

The akv contract at $92 per point cost $2675 total to close. $157 in MF's fees and I'm guessing $160 MF's for 2016. I had 75 points to work with. Used 72 for 8 nights. One five night stay and one three night stay. Take off AP savings and a conservative $300 savings using TIW and I got to $232 per night for AKV in a room that has a good chance of either a pool or savanna view. Thats still a little shy of break even when comparing to renting points but when I was renting I could never get a value room, not even when using a broker.

Now I don't have 2016 points left but if another good deal comes along like my BLT trip I want to squeeze one more trip out of those passes. After that we will take a disney break and do some cruises and non disney vacations. When we come back to it in a couple years ill be getting a five night stay every other year for just the cost of MF's on 25 points. Not bad. I made it work this way to prove to husband that I wasn't throwing vacation dollars away.

 

[wolfador]

My wife and I just did a 60pt @ GFV for our first contract. We were looking at resales but we felt "better" buying direct for our first one. We are now looking to add ~100 at BC or BW to get us enough points for our usual trips. Getting both the 2014/2015 points is enough for us to finish out the year of our disney trips while we wait to get the points for next years.

 

[Disney LOVE Travel]

My wife and I just did a 60pt @ GFV for our first contract. We were looking at resales but we felt "better" buying direct for our first one. We are now looking to add ~100 at BC or BW to get us enough points for our usual trips. Getting both the 2014/2015 points is enough for us to finish out the year of our disney trips while we wait to get the points for next years.

how were you able to buy your first contract direct at such a low point buy-in, if you don't mind me asking? We wanted to do that but were told we had to at least buy 100 pts for our first contract.

 

[wolfador]

They just mentioned that 50 was the min. Maybe it was some special or something? We first did a tour in the morning and came back a few hours later after deciding on 60, we did it at the Community Hall at BWV.

 

[Dean]

Right. That's why 50 points (or better yet 25 points) are the most certain types of contracts to save you money because the pay off is so quick. The MF's by far swamp out the tiny amount of extra money spent due to paying a premium for the points.

The couple I know of who have done this are those where the AP discount works, they bought a small package (25 & 50 pts) and they listed multiple people with multiple addresses. I haven't heard whether anyone has had any limitations on the number of discounts per year in this situation used in such a way though. One really has to go all in on this perk for it to be worthwhile I think.

 

[Disney LOVE Travel]

They just mentioned that 50 was the min. Maybe it was some special or something? We first did a tour in the morning and came back a few hours later after deciding on 60, we did it at the Community Hall at BWV.

Very cool. If they would've let me buy 50 or 60 points initial buy-in a few years ago when I toured, I would have signed on-site. Probably a good thing I couldn't at the time..

 

[HokieGCC]

The couple I know of who have done this are those where the AP discount works, they bought a small package (25 & 50 pts) and they listed multiple people with multiple addresses.

We didn't need to go to that extreme to get a quick return. We just got the passes for the 4 of us and the return took a couple years at most. The other thing that is easy forget about is the main costs of DVC being the MF's. If you paid $10 extra per point to get a small contract the net result is ~$500 extra cost for 50 points. After 27 years your MF's will be ~$10K for those 50 points making that extra $500 look pretty small.

 

[Dean]

We didn't need to go to that extreme to get a quick return. We just got the passes for the 4 of us and the return took a couple years at most. The other thing that is easy forget about is the main costs of DVC being the MF's. If you paid $10 extra per point to get a small contract the net result is ~$500 extra cost for 50 points. After 27 years your MF's will be ~$10K for those 50 points making that extra $500 look pretty small.

Your situation is still an extreme example, one that's applicable to only a very small subset of owners and potential buyers. While it might add value, the situation where the perks make it reasonable to buy will be extremely few and far between.

 

[HokieGCC]

Your situation is still an extreme example

Extreme? Interesting word to use. I think the original question was about a 50 point contract ... by definition a very narrow subset of possibilities ... that I guess in some minds is extreme. If you go to Disney every year and have a medium sized family I would call that pretty common. In that case a 50 point contract can save a ton quickly if you are smart (or "extreme") about it.

 

[disneynutz]

Very cool. If they would've let me buy 50 or 60 points initial buy-in a few years ago when I toured, I would have signed on-site. Probably a good thing I couldn't at the time..

Disney tends to flip flop on their policies. If sales are slower than forecasted, they reduce the minimum buy in and/or add some special limited time price or bonus.

If sales are brisk, prices go up, minimums go up, and not a special to be found.

Bill

 

[johde]

I purchased 60 points at OKW 14 years ago. It's paid for itself many times over compared to paying rack rate. Over the years, I've rarely been able to take advantage of the discounts. That being said, at current prices, I'm not quite as sure it would work out as well.

 

[Dean]

We didn't need to go to that extreme to get a quick return. We just got the passes for the 4 of us and the return took a couple years at most. The other thing that is easy forget about is the main costs of DVC being the MF's. If you paid $10 extra per point to get a small contract the net result is ~$500 extra cost for 50 points. After 27 years your MF's will be ~$10K for those 50 points making that extra $500 look pretty small.

The situation where a small contract, AP, group size will all come together to make this worthwhile is exteme. Given that to make this plan work based on the discounts and not FL resident's means you're betting that a couple of usages will have enough value to justify the purcchase on that basis alone. I'd venture that we're talking far less than 1%, likely less than 0.1%. Still it's good for potential owners to know about in case it works for them.

ETA, my response was based on buying the small contract with the focus on the pass savings/discounts. Obviously the group where a smaller package would work mainly for usage is larger but still not that large, I'd say still far less than 5%.