Sharing Timeshare with Family. Good idea or disaster?

[AMCSquared]

Bad Idea!!! Jointly owning things like this with anyone is a recipe for issues down the road, and it will be a pain to keep track of who uses which points without seeming petty to each other. A better option would be for each family to buy a smaller contract (ie. if you were going to buy 400 points each family buy 200). You can then use borrowing/banking such that each family books a large suite every other year. Or each family could get a smaller room for themselves each year if you guys want to stay separately.

Yes, buy separate. We do Disney related stuff with another family (cruise, WDW, Aulani, etc.) together. However, both families bought separate DVC contracts. We do "pool" DVC points together to get the larger Villas instead of two separate smaller rooms.

Instead of borrowing each others points, we actually just book two segments of the trip together. For example, if we are planning a one-week trip on an expensive 3-bedroom Villa, family-A would book the first 3 days and family-B would book the next 3 days. We make sure we are all on each others reservation and link the 2 separate reservations together. Since you can't really transfer banked/borrowed points to another contract, this works well for us.

The resort can always link different credit cards for each of the room keys, etc. So we don't "mingle" charges for each family either.

 

[Dean]

Never would I enter into such a family partnership. There's no real benefit and tons of risk. This type of situation has the real potential to split families permanently. I'd buy separately. If you want to do separate home resorts and trade reservations back and forth or do split stays, that can be a win-win situation.