Fool4Disney said:
... would our membership end in 2042 or 2054?
Any benefits right now to buying a resale rather than directly from Disney? Is Disney offering any incentives right now?
There are a couple of resorts where I'm not sure it make sense to buy resale right now, and SSR is one of them. The current basic SSR deal (I believe, and someone set me straight if I'm wrong) is $95-$8 rebate = $87 per point, and they pay annual dues for the remainder of 2005. Bear in mind that they are selling October use year, so they are really only paying 3 months of dues: October-December '05. The only other incentives I know of are the backpack and lithograph you get.
[Supposedly...the price on SSR is going up to $98-8 in early June.]
There is only one SSR resale that's gone through on the ROFR thread, and that one was an unusual case. The buyers are in Australia, and if I am not mistaken, did not have the option of buying directly from Disney because Disney is not authorized to sell in Australia. That contract was for 150 points at $83 (Feb use year). There were no banked or borrowed points, so they got the full allocation of '05 points.
If you do the math on that sale, you find they actually paid a little more than they would have paid buying direct from Disney. I'd estimate they paid about $400 in closing costs and they would have to pay dues from Feb '05 forward, which would be $525. Add those together and divide by 150 and you get costs of $6.17 per point + $83 = $89.17 per point actual cost. That works out to a little more than $300 extra, but as I said, they really had no choice but to buy resale.
Resale will save you money with most of the sold out resorts, but I don't see it saving enough to justify the time and uncertainty of resale if you're buying SSR.