Help! Join DVC even if I always save 20-30% on rooms?

[Christina2.0]

You may want to think about what happens when your older one goes to kindergarten or 1st grade, and whether you'll still go at the times of year you have been. Our kids are almost 6 and 1.5. the 6yo is finishing up her 1st year in kindergarten.


Good point, honestly didnt think about that. It could cut our trips shorter. I usually book 7-12 months out. Sometimes a bounce back offer when I'll already there.

 

[MattKreps]

OP - We went through the same process - got GREAT advice from the experiences folks here - and changed our buy. Will you save money? Hard to know. I looked at it this way - take the all-in cost of the packaged trip my wife has booked (hotel, parks, tickets), and come up with a cost per day. Then take that same trip, and run it at a top hotel, since DVC is much nicer than the AoA or CBR rooms we were booking. Then look at DVC on a basis of buy-in plus maint for multiple years, going each year, buying park passes and dining each year.

By the time we worked different scenarios, we were getting about the same cost per day, but nicer rooms, more relaxing vacations and a higher likliehood we'd do family activities outside of Disney or enjoy the non-park features Disney offers at the resorts. The trick is that the multiple years number you choose is arbitrary, and depends on how many times you can go to Disney in a certain window. But we also realized we would go by ourselves with DVC, and do the Run Disney events or a special event, getting more use (although adding travel cost).

You're buying a capital asset that you allocate over a 10-year plus window, plus add in the incremental ongoing costs, to really compare. But for us, we want to be at Disney more, even without the kids, so the math works well enough to make it worthwhile. But if we just wanted to go every couple years, and stay at a low cost property with an "all-in" vacation deal, run through the parks hard every day, and go home happy but exhausted, DVC wasn't a good value.

We quickly realized this decision was changing how we wanted to vacation, and I posted a thread asking others how it changed the way they Disney, confirming what we were thinking. That was really helpful. We're looking forward to getting our contract, and first thing we'll probably do is find a week wife and I can get a low point cost studio and go just for us. We both work from home or remote, and have family to watch our boys, so a little more flex to enjoy and maximize the opportunity to use our DVC.

 

[davidl81]

I agree that break even is roughly 7-12 years depending on where you bought and the price you pay. I will be honest though and realize that we will never save "money" by purchasing DVC since we mostly now stay in 1BD or bring friends/family and stay in 2BD. If we were paying cash I am sure we would only book regular rooms, thus our break even math does not work out. The flip side is that we have enjoyed those vacations so much it was worth the cost we spent on DVC.

What I cannot answer is how the math work out on newer resorts. I do not see how you can break even on $165 per point at PVB with the amount of points it takes to book a room there.

 

[Disney Dad ADL]

I agree that break even is roughly 7-12 years depending on where you bought and the price you pay. I will be honest though and realize that we will never save "money" by purchasing DVC since we mostly now stay in 1BD or bring friends/family and stay in 2BD. If we were paying cash I am sure we would only book regular rooms, thus our break even match does not work out. The flip side is that we have enjoyed those vacations so much it was worth the cost we spent on DVC.

What I cannot answer is how the math work out on newer resorts. I do not see how you can break even on $165 per point at PVB with the amount of pints it takes to book a room there.

You still do, mainly because the cash rates at Poly and other deluxe resorts are so high.

1 week in a PVC studio in September is 118 points (let's round it to 120 @$165 pp). With 3% increase in MFs ever year, that's about $106,000 over the life of the contract. If you were to pay cash at a 30% discount, that's $370 per night. Assuming a increase of 3% per year, that's $303,000 over the life of the contract. Break even at year 10.

Edit: interestingly, if you change the rate of increase of cash rooms to 0% but keep the 3% increase in MFs, you still break even year 12, but the final tally is $106,000 for DVC vs $132,000 for cash.

 

[crisi]

Be aware of availability and what having a home resort means with DVC. It can save you money - but owning a resort means you'll be able to book other resorts at seven months - assuming there is AVAILABILTY. Which is a huge assumption - particularly if you are looking at wanting to regularly stay at Grand Floridian or the Boardwalk. DVC will mean making your plans in advance - its possible to be five months out and have no rooms available anywhere for all the days you want to go. It will mean trying to switch to the resort you really want this year at 7 months - to discover it isn't available. At seven months, a large resort like SSR is usually available, but you may or may not be able to stay at BCV - and by six and a half months the rooms available at BCV are likely to be gone.

Cash has the advantage of being WAY more flexible.

 

[Deb & Bill]

Break even has to take into mind what trips you would take if you didn't own DVC. We've taken 40+ trips in our 20 years of DVC. The first one wasn't DVC and maybe one other (but it was a government conference so we got lodging and I got per diem). I seriously doubt we would have taken so many WDW trips if we didn't own DVC. And we wouldn't have booked one, two and three bedroom villas for cash. We would probably have stuck with moderates for fewer nights.

 

[Littlelulu01]

The hardest part for me is now that our kids are grown their schedules are not in my control. Up through college it was much easier to plan trips in advance. Add in boyfriends and potentially husbands and their schedules and the whole points plans can get blown out of the water very quickly. Last minute changes, points that have gone into holding, having to get a one bedroom Aulani ocean view when you had budgeted for a studio because someone's schedule changes too late to get a less expensive room... not really sure this whole analysis of cost per point over the life of contract really works out for me. It's more like how many trips compared to cash to break even. Once at the break even point, the future cost of stays is just the cost of mf's in my mind. The resale value will be something depending on how long we keep the contracts but in the meantime it's dvc stays for mf's. I think in the end most don't get too burned with dvc and end up saving over cash but savings is relative. You are still giving disney a chunk of your vacation budget and probably more than a non dvc owner. It's a great thing if you love your dvc vacations and can reasonably predict keeping the points a few years after they have paid for themselves.