That depends on how you travel now or plan to travel in the near future...
For us, to break even would take longer, b/c we haven't yet spent huge amounts of money at Disney hotels. We plan to, however! ha ha, well, not really...we don't really have much overwhelming need to stay at a place like the Grand Floridian...we would probably be happy at Moderates. So our average FUTURE cost for vacations there would be lower than some, and it would take more of our future average vacations, or the cost of them, to equal the cost of DVC.
These are numbers from just yesterday. The minimum to get into DVC directly is 160 points. Right now the points are $112 each. Right now, and
I'll just state it for Bay Lake Towers and Animal Kingdom's villas, b/c that's actually what we're looking at and it's what is for sale TODAY, not at the end of this month, there are incentives listed
here. (easier than listing them out)
According to the guide, the required downpayment is $1720. If you did that and then financed it all through them, in a 10 year loan at 14+& interest (aka worst case scenario, BUT know that you can prepay at any time without penalty...it's simple, not compound interest), the monthly payment for that loan is $258.26.
There are also maintenance fees, and he estimated those to be 50.93 per month, though I'm not sure what resort he used for those. And those change every year.
If you think about 50 years of
Disney vacations and estimate how much you'd be spending on those...and compare it even to that worst case scenario, you can see that the worst case financing TOTAL over the 10 years is far less than you'd be spending on 50 years of Disney vacations.
Since we have family out there (living in small places where we wouldn't want to stay and so would be at WDW anyway) and we adore Disney, it really makes sense, even in that worst case full financing (other than the down payment) scenario.