Thank you to Jeffrey for his great guest post yesterday about timeshares!  I thought I’d add in my two cents on the whole timeshare idea.

The fact is, I love timeshares.  I love using them, I love staying in them, I love their availability.  You know what I love even more about timeshares?  When they’re not mine.  

westin princeville ocean resort villas - a beautiful timeshare on the island of Kauai.

no one ever said timeshares can't be beautiful

I don’t own a timeshare.  I admit, I felt the pull toward them; which for someone like me who won’t even buy new clothes is sort of concerning.  The lure is impressive, when they sit you down and explain it to you.  More than once I’ve taken the sales-perfect-pitch written upside-down on a piece of paper back to our room and stared at it.  (God I find it so tacky, when the sales person sitting across from you writes the maintenance fees and mortgage upside down so you can read it, circling the amount you save just by owning!)  More than once I’ve done more research on the topic online to see if it’s for real.

For reals…ain’t no way we can afford a timeshare, no matter how logically they break it down.

We’ve stayed in the timeshare owned by a former coworker of mine four times.  I love staying in them.  They’re huge, luxurious, and extremely cheap compared to hotels.  My former coworker had a bajillion points that she never used up every year, so she would either just give me the points (very generous, I know), or I would pay her market value for them.  Sometimes market value was equal to what a room in a hotel would have been. Sometimes market value was way, way less than a hotel ($150 for 3 nights in a 2 bedroom condo in Kauai?  Sign me up.).  In all cases, the timeshare offered free wifi, free parking, and a giant condo that held a kitchen and other great amenities.

It’s no wonder I really, really thought about owning one.

But behind the scenes of every great idea is reality.  In reality, my coworker was paying $600 a month on maintenance fees for the timeshare properties.  On top of the mortgage she paid for the points.  Holy…what?  That was $7,200 annually she was spending on fees alone!  I just looked up a timeshare rental for a resort on the Big Island of Hawaii – it’s a 2 bedroom, 2 bath at a great resort…and it costs $1,500.  She could stay there almost 5 weeks out of the year, on her maintenance fees alone.

But wait!  There’s more!

My coworker likes going to Las Vegas.  I just found a 2 bed, 2 bath timeshare for rental at the Marriott Grand Chateau for $1000 for the week.  That means that for maintenance fees alone, she could stay in Vegas for seven weeks.  Seven weeks!  I don’t even know how many years I would have to go without vacation just to accrue 7 weeks of vacation in one year.

So is a timeshare for you?

It’s not for me.  I still feel the tug of the timeshare (Imagine!  A mandatory vacation you pay for every year!), and sometimes the number logic that they deal me when I’m trying to get my free $150 American Express gift card pulls at my yearn to travel.  (Note to friends with babies – they don’t allow kids.  But they don’t allow spouses to sit in the presentation alone.  So…they grudgingly allow the baby to be in the room, but the presentation ends up rushed because the baby is screaming.  You still get the gift card.)  But reality prevails, for sure.  We just can’t afford that type of vacation mortgage, when we struggle to find a way to get a regular mortgage.  Plus their interest rate?

Fuggedaboutit.

Thanks again for Jeffrey for his gust post!  Have you/will you/what do you think…timeshare-wise?

We’ve been planning our anniversary trip for a year – saving up for it for two years.  Since we were married on Leap Day, my husband decided that very four years we would take a trip, thereby warding off the stereotypical flowers-dinner anniversary that most anniversaries default into.  Since we have a toddler, I tried to think of something that would be toddler appropriate while still being a blast for us.  What did I think of?  Disney Cruise!

i will not fall overboard, i will not fall overboard, i will not fall overboard.

We’ll be setting sail on the Disney Wonder next week.  It had a special “kids-sail-free” special going on, which made our balcony room (all included meals) about $2K.  We are very excited, and except for the ebola virus we seem to have caught, are amped to go on our trip.

Is it expensive? Sort of.  We bought the extra trip insurance because I’m pregnant and we have a toddler – in case the doc had put me on bed rest or something, at least our trip would have been covered.  Since we did, though, it comes out to around $350 a day for the 3 of us.  We’re not drinking right now (thanks fetus!) so booze expense will be nothing, and we’re only doing one port adventure as a family given our son’s age and my “fragile” state (which makes me ineligible to go canopy zip-lining with my husband, grr).  We’re going to have a couple meals apart from our son (which is an additional expense), and the nursery costs $6/hour.  Apart from that and the embarrassingly large sombrero I plan on getting, we should really have few expenses.

It is a bold departure from our honeymoon trip for sure, where we planned our day around the happy hour at the bar and participated in the bar crawl.  We also got tipsy and went to an art auction.  Not a good idea.  Don’t recommend it.  Buh-bye moolah.

But in reality, we are excited.  Happy to be getting away from my current drama.  Happy to be surrounded by people who have drunk the kool-aid of “the happiest place on earth”.  And happy to pretend for a second that our life isn’t quickly becoming, well, sort of ghetto (I duct-taped my kids diaper today because it ripped.  Is that normal?).

So here’s to happiness.  Here’s to vacations.  And here’s to hoping no one I love falls overboard.  Cheers Matey!

You want to know what’s not a good thing?  Reading this before you take a cruise.  Not cool.  Not cool at all.  Now my fears of my kid going overboard have increased tenfold.  Don’t read that if you’re going on a cruise soon.  

Who’s been burgled?  Really, who hasn’t been burgled?  Being a victim of theft is anger-inducing and scary…and no one likes to think of themselves that way.  But in reality, we’re all thieves…we’re all guilty of stealing something – even though those thefts might be of the socially acceptable variety.

“Seriously Kris”, you might be thinking.  ”I don’t steal anything.”  I challenge you!  I will hazard to guess that you might be guilty of one of the following…and not even think of it in terms of stealing.  Let me do a quick breakdown for you… Read the rest of this entry →

Do you have a game plan for your life?  The idea/goal that you run your life by, thinking that the life you are living subscribes to the “rules” you’ve set it run by?

Then have you had fate laugh in your face for thinking you know better than destiny?

Ha!  (I’m fate, laughing in your face.) Read the rest of this entry →