What can go wrong

[sean-1966]

One point that you mentioned and it hasn't been addressed. DVC cannot raise the amount of points for staying. There are XX number of points for each hotel and that's it. If they want to add more points to a certain week they have to lower the points from another week.

 

[Dean]

Admittedly I haven't read the fine print, but seems to me that paying a special assessment, or even annual dues, is discretionary. You have the option of paying; selling; or walking away from the whole thing. All the timeshares I'm familiar with report a certain percentage of owners who fail to pay annual dues; requiring the management to "foreclose" to recoup. Which leads me to believe that walking away without further liability is an option. That's drastic, but in some cases it could be the best alternative.

There is no doubt that many timeshares simply take it back and move on. Many times they don't sue you or report to the credit card agencies. But remember you're talking weeks worth a couple of thousand dollars in many cases. If you don't pay all money owed, you are not in good standing and cannot use the membership until caught up. At some point they will re-posses it. They certainly have the right to go after you directly including your home and real assets. Whether they would go to that degree would be up to them. They might or might not but there certainly is a risk involved. Thus I represented this as a risk. And I have read the fine print as well as having a moderate amount of knowledge about how other timeshares respond in this situation though fortunately I don't have experience.

One point that you mentioned and it hasn't been addressed. DVC cannot raise the amount of points for staying. There are XX number of points for each hotel and that's it. If they want to add more points to a certain week they have to lower the points from another week.

I did address it in my first post. The way I read the legal paperwork is this. A "unit" must remain the same for the entire year. They could lower one day and raise another. They could lower one season and raise another. And they could even potentially raise one unit size and lower another. You say no way, here's why I interpret it that way. Go back to my statement above about a unit remaining the same for the year or better yet, go back and read the POS about these issues including the definition. With DVC the definition of a unit is not a single room but a collection of rooms. At HH and OKW it's a building. At the others it's a group of rooms usually on the same floor. At VB a unit was an entire floor initially but because they have to declare the entire unit in inventory to sell, they quickly found this was not a good idea. While I think it's unlikely they'd change the points for one size vs another, I do believe it's possible under the legal guidelines.

 

[keishashadow]

One point that you mentioned and it hasn't been addressed. DVC cannot raise the amount of points for staying. There are XX number of points for each hotel and that's it. If they want to add more points to a certain week they have to lower the points from another week.

??? Historically, has DVC tweaked point allocations in the past?

 

[solgent]

My husband and I talked through some worst case scenarios before we bought. We didn't think about any of these sort of legal aspects, but we did come up a couple of things that OP didn't mention.

1) DisneyWorld is no longer a fun place to go. (This may be hard for some to imagine! They do have a good thing going now. But DW in 20 years depends on future decisons, which could be bad. If you read Disney Wars, about Eisner's time as CEO, well, he made some good moves and some idiotic ones. I am definitely hoping that Disney and Pixar can reunite now that Eisner is gone. Pixar is a very valuable alliance for the company and the theme parks.)

Our response: it's still a Florida vacation.

2) Energy prices increase to the point that we can't afford to travel to FL.

Our response: We will sell to someone who can afford to go, because they have more money or they live closer.

3) Terrorists release the smallpox virus.. nuclear bomb in Manhattan... whatever disaster scenario you like

Our response: it was fun while it lasted!