boyblue
TUG Member
At what cost per point does PFD become a bad option?
My rule of thumb for RCI Points is to aim to acquire the property for $.01 per point (including closing and transfer) and maintenance of $.008 per point.
PFD is the same (the $26 fee is negligible) except there's no guarantee RCI won't someday cease to offer it.
Wow. I thought I had done well buying a 59,600 annual point timeshare on eBay for about $1250 including closing costs, transfer, and RCI Points membership. That works out to $0.021 per point to purchase (double your target acquisition price). My maintenance fee and taxes are about $750 or $0.0126 per point (nearly double your target mf price). How do you do so well? Where do you buy and what properties?
For newbies like myself, what is PFD?
Where do you buy and what properties?
A reasonable target is 75,000 points for $750 at maintenance of $600/yr.
Set an ongoing search on Ebay with search terms that work for you, bid low at the end of the auction, and be patient.
If you search completed auctions for some of the high-volume sellers you'll see where the market is these days.
I hedged my bets by purchasing an "underlying" week that I would be glad to use as a fixed week every year.
It rents easily for close to twice the maintenance fees.
So for all of these reasons I did not hesitate to pay the price we did.
I personally would not feel comfortable owning points at some podunk resort that I would never want to use for my own vacations.
I'm glad to pay a little extra to acquire and maintain a top quality week. I consider the extra costs to be a cheap form of insurance.
Since I have a deep distrust of RCI/Cendant, based upon all the "games" they have played through the years, when I decided to venture into the world of RCI Points, I hedged my bets by purchasing an "underlying" week that I would be glad to use as a fixed week every year, just in case the rules of the RCI game gets changed, or the availability of decent exchanges dwindles.