If you are going the owning route, you need to know your exit strategy because timeshares are easy to buy and difficult to sell. If not renting, suggest you buy either Florida or South Carolina or California not Virginia because these states have non-judicial, anti-deficiency laws to protect timeshare consumers. Read the sticky on the Buying, Selling forum for these state laws.
Basically if you lost your job or health and could not continue with payments, then these laws enable you to walk and all they can do is foreclose and take your timeshare back as compensation. They cannot go after your other assets and wages to pay back maintenance fees, legal fees etc. as they could in states like Virginia.
A better exit as stated previously by another poster is to go with a major chain with a deedback program. Marriott/Vistana/Hyatt and Hilton are reputable. I don't know about Wyndham and HICV's record. You should search TUG threads for deedback success with those programs. Avoid Diamond or Westgate and some of the smaller indepdendents because they charge exhorbitant fees or their programs are not reliable. The deedback programs can be eliminated at any time so having a fallback in a state that has reasonable foreclosure laws as described above is important.
