As an owner, I'll +1 that you should never buy directly from Hilton. We recently bought 2 weeks/2-bedroom/Gold-weeks in Orlando for ~$3k on the resale market, and it even included the previous year's worth of banked points. The recession pushed A LOT of resale properties on to the market and they still haven't dried up yet. Beyond the small initial investment, our annual maintenance/club fees are ~75% what we would pay for the same accommodations booked direct. We visit Orlando enough that we don't worry much about the points going unused (though we're into year 2 and are just now exhausting the banked points that were included and actually starting to use the current year's points).
For other owners, have you ever actually converted your remaining points for the year to HHonors? The conversion rate seems extremely poor so we've just saved our points at the end of the last 2 years (so far we've only redeemed at HGVC properties, so not being able to use the saved points outside of HGVC doesn't bother us).