Quick follow up question/suggestion. I know you can't bank points within last 4 months, but can you deposit them in RCI for two years? I've searched for how to do this, and surprisingly have found absolutely no results anywhere, other than a couple threads saying to call member services to do it. With HGVC, RCI is the catch all bucket when points are expiring so you have two more years to use them for RCI points/weeks reservations. The one downside is with so few points, you may not be able to get a whole week in RCI, so will be limited to Points (day) reservations, which even further limits how they can be used. I guess you can always deposit more points with RCI to make up the difference needed. BTW, I haven't used RCI w/
DVC but have extensively with HGVC (Hilton) and while it seems difficult to actually book something it's actually quite easy once you get the hang of it. The secret is ongoing searches, so while you'll never see inventory for a Hilton Hawaii resort, for example, if you do an ongoing search you can easily find one if your dates are somewhat flexible. Think of ongoing search as the DVC waitlist on steroids. It's super powerful -- you can specify check-in date ranges, regions (e.g. Waikoloa resorts on the Big Island of Hawaii), specific resorts (by code, which you can find under Resources > Resort Directory), and minimum room size (Hotel, 1 bdrm, 2bdrm, etc). With these controls you can easily find a resort if you plan in advance and are patient. Trust me, people exchange out of HGVC all the time (I did into DVC 5 times before becoming a DVC member) and HGVC has some nice resorts. Actually all the resorts DVC members have access to are great (they only allow exchanges into/out of Gold Crown and Silver Crown resorts). Anywho, just a question/suggestion in case you can deposit into RCI within the last 4 months, which from what I've read I think you can, but haven't really seen a definitive answer.
