Yes -- although that's where we are currently, not how it was when we took the timeshare plunge initially in 2002.
We started out just owning an outstanding (resale) Orlando 3BR-3BA lock-off unit. Then we joined TUG, where we soon found out about
Tiger Trader bargain timeshares in South Africa. After looking into those, we bought 1 for $750 (total) that came with several years paid-ahead membership in RCI. Our only purpose in buying in South Africa was to swing nice RCI trades into other people's USA timeshares. That worked great.
By & by, thanks to TUG-BBS, we got interested in RCI Points also. Before long we bought a small eBay points timeshare as a toe-hold into the points system, so we were cruising in both lanes of RCI. Within just a few years, however, we noticed that we were practically always going for RCI
Last Call & on-sale
Extra Vacation Getaway & minimal-points
Instant Exchange timeshare reservations, rather than straight-points exchanges. Even with our low annual allocation of points, that meant we were accumulating more timeshare points than we needed for timeshare vacationing. One year we even had to use a bunch of excess points to buy Disney tickets, because the points had gone stale & would have expired without getting us anything if we had not used them for the tickets.
Eventually we downsized to the max -- gave away all our weeks timeshares & reduced our points timeshare ownership to the bare minimum, a triennial 1BR points unit in Las Vegas.
That's where we are today -- owning a timeshare just so we can have access to RCI.
Is this a great country or what ?
-- Alan Cole, McLean (Fairfax County), Virginia, USA.