To help understand use years months a little, make yourself a small chart. A use year is not the same as a calendar year Jan-Dec, but rather a 12 month span going from one use year month to the next.
Your vacation dates then fall within a given use year. You can bank point from one use year into the next, and/or you can borrow points from a later use year into a prior year.
For a September use year your calendar would look like this:
<b>Use Year.....Vacation Dates</b>
2002.....Sep 1, 2002 thru Aug 31, 2003
2003.....Sep 1, 2003 thru Aug 31, 2004
2004.....Sep 1, 2004 thru Aug 31, 2005
2005.....Sep 1, 2005 thru Aug 31, 2006
and so on.
A vacation in January 2004 will be in your 2003 use year so you would use 2003 points for that vacation.
For a 150 point contract, you would receive 150 points on Sep 1, 2003 for your 2003 use year. They are also offering you 2002 points, which are good until Aug 31, 2003. You can bank these points into the next year, which in this case is 2003. Thus you would have 300 points available for use during the timeframe Sep 1, 2003 thru Aug 31, 2004.
You can also borrow from your 2004 use year, and put those points into 2003 also. This would then give you 450 points available for 2003 (Sep 1, 2003 thru Aug 31, 2004)
A couple of things to keep in mind. Once points are banked or borrowed, they cannot be returned to their original use year.
Also, there are banking deadlines. The banking deadline for 100% of 2002 year points for you would be Feb 28, 2003. On a new purchase I believe they will still let you bank after that date if you do it as part of the purchase. If you don't bank your 2002 points you can be forced to have to use them (or some of them) before Aug 31, 2003.
Besides the 100% banking date, there's a 50% banking date (May 31, but May 30, 2003 this year since the 31st is a Saturday), and a 25% banking date. (June 30th). You cannot accumulate points. So if you banked 75 points in February, you cannot bank another 75 points in May as May is 50% of points and you had already banked 50% so you can't bank any more)
This will all be explained in your owner's literature.
Finally, as far as making reservations, your use year <b>has absolutely nothing</b> to do with when you can make a reservation. For your home resort you can make a reservation 11-months to the day of your planned vacation's <b> Check-OUT</b> date. When you make the reservation it is only necessary that there will be sufficient points available at the time of the actual vacation.
So suppose you wanted to make a 7-night reservation for January 4th thru Jan 10th, 2004, checking out the morning of Jan 11th. Suppose you wanted a 1-B/R villa at BCV's which requires 200 points.
You would make this reservation anytime on or after Feb 11th, 2003. At the time of the reservation you would only have 150 points available for 2003 so you would need at this time to either bank 50 points from 2002 or borrow 50 points from 2004 in order to have the necessary 200 year 2003 points.
Now, in reality here's what you'd probably want to do. If that January trip will be your first trip, then you want to bank ALL of your 2002 points into 2003. This now gives you 300 points in 2003. If your vacation is only going to take 200 points, then when you make the reservation tell MS to use ALL 150 of the banked 2002 year points, and 50 of the new 2003 points for this vacation. This leaves your other 100 year 2003 points still available for banking into 2004 if you want to do that.
If you instead used all of the 2003 points and only 50 of the banked 2002 points, then you'd wind up with 100 banked 2002 points that could not be banked into 2004, and you'd be forced to use them before they expired.
Hope this helps.
