Originally Posted by
Lavarock7
A consumer advisor suggests that if you are hell-bent to buy a timeshare, go to the place you have chosen and ask residents "anyone selling?". You may find that you can save tremendous amounts of money. Also, when you find someone selling cheap, think why?
This is good advice.
We bought a timeshare week on Maui 26 years ago (interesting aside: the salesman told us then that there would be no more timeshares built on Maui - ever.
)
A few years ago, the people who owned the three weeks after ours contacted us. They had bought a whole condo in the same complex and didn't need the timeshare weeks so they offered one or more weeks to us at a greatly discounted price (considerably less that we had paid for our week in 1981.) We bought their three weeks - so now we go to Maui for four weeks every October.
Which also goes to show that timeshares should not be bought as an investment. Our four weeks are selling on the resale market for about the same price as we paid for that first week in 1981.