That's real impressive, you have deep knowledge and insights if all true. I'm impressed and would love to know how you do what you do. We are no longer timeshare Owners, and never plan to be again, it's your use of the system that I find intriguing.
Re-sale? You got lucky....'and I'll raise you one'. Unless you inherited it from your parents in the 1970's, I can't see you got any value on a re-sale, unless its some extradentary product? 'Excellent value' could have all sorts of meaning and interpretation?
AI suggests
The thing is - while no one currently separates the data between lawyer and doctor, that doesn't affect things like the lower earning degrees still having lower unemployment. You also have a bunch of "mid tier" fields like engineering, technology, healthcare, and business management. And as I pointed out, career progression seems to me (and AI seems to agree FWIW) to be more limited with just a high school diploma. You also don't get the networking opportunities.
I wonder if "young workers" excludes the recent college graduates. Either way, they're beating by around 3% the whole group, and in line with rates near the beginning of the chart too in the early 1990s. I don't find it strange that younger workers are a bit more likely to be unemployed - less tied down so more willing to take risks, less experience so even with degrees a bit less desirable than people with experience, etc etc.There is some data from the Fed here that is interesting:
The Labor Market for Recent College Graduates
Data on employment outcomes for new graduates and young workers.www.newyorkfed.org
Sounds like Marriott is probably one of the easier to rent for more than MFs than the others, so if you want to take care of the tax paperwork etc then it can be something to keep in mind.
One issue with this is that it just pure unemployment rates. Not if the employee is employed in their desired field of work or in the field of work they went to college for. It may not also track part-time vs. full-time employment. Meaning someone with a degree is working to make ends meet, but their degree wasn't needed to actually get the job they have.There is some data from the Fed here that is interesting:
The Labor Market for Recent College Graduates
Data on employment outcomes for new graduates and young workers.
Original timeshare purchase from Marriott in 2007 (Phuket Beach Club), then many resales since along with strategic purchases directly from Marriott to enroll a few of the resale weeks prior to 2023. This provides weeks to book directly and Abound points / II exchanges to book properties I do not own. All hotel stays booked with Bonvoy points. List of properties stayed at in the last 12 months:
I'm guessing the resale value is vs other ways of obtaining the accommodations.
Wouldn't you expect the same issues for non-college though? Why would they be more likely to be in their desired field of work or full time vs part time? Stepping back, I personally would need more data to consider it much more than a wash. I took some time off before getting my degree, and I can't say I loved the jobs I could get hired for then compared to now.
This has 2 potential, very different, meanings. In the worst case, they're working at McDonalds or some job that has no training requirement or education requirement at all. In the mid case, they're working at a job that you could get without a degree but the degree gave you a leg up in hiring (for me like when I worked at "the geek squad" years ago on computers, having a degree in IT stuff helped get me hired and was used a bit to advertise to customers - like auto shops would put up certificates from mechanics etc). This is probably widely common, and we can argue where the value is - it's hard to generalize the bump some people got vs the cost of their degree across all fields etc. In the best case they get jobs that explicitly require a degree to be considered. Note not a specific degree though.
IDK, Women at 15.5% difference vs men at 11.1% is a 4.4% difference. I don't know if I'd consider 4.4% a "far bigger difference".I did find this other chart interesting. It shows labor force participation rate based on education and sex. Interesting that the number for men are within about 10 points of each other for those with high school education or higher. Women is a far bigger difference.
If you get the re-sales for a low enough cost (often can be acquired for pennies on the retail dollar or even free) they can be excellent value, as the annual Maintenance Fees are often cheaper than staying in hotels in the same area, especially during more popular times of year when hotel rates skyrocket while timeshare MFs are the same regardless of what time of year your stay is. This is even more true when considering that in timeshares you are often getting a condo-style accommodation with amenities that smaller hotel rooms do not. Retail pricing is where it's harder to see any value, unless you amoritize the purchase price in over a VERY long period of time, and even then it can be difficult depending on what you bought and/or how you use it.
It depends what you own. My Marriott's Shadow Ridge Villages is not renting for a lot over MF's, and I reserved Presidents' week. I am pretty disappointed that only two of my one bedrooms have rented. I have the studios that haven't rented. I may have to lower my price. RW will make more money than I will.
I own 2 weeks Desert Springs Villas 1 and don't actually want rent them out. I prefer to get 4 II deposits out of them but I keep getting asked if I could rent out the 1BR to this renter that I know from a one-time rental that I did several years ago. I just let this person have them at breakeven cost. I still get to deposit my studios into II and exchange back into 2BRs.
Oh, come on. We know you spent 2% of your time in college actually learning any "skill", other than beer pong & pick-up lines.
It would seem then that 80% of the cost of college is just money down the toilet? It is money spent on nothing other than possible clout? An old boys club. If they only charged for the other 20% that really mattered, then students could come out with the skills they really need for a lot less money.Oh, come on. We know you spent 2% of your time in college actually learning any "skill", other than beer pong & pick-up lines.
"College is more like a country club that also teaches you some things. The value is probably ~80% "being in the club" ... The 18% learning part is not in any way how to do a specific job, or specific skills ... 2% is probably skills that are both directly applicable to a specific job and still relevant by the time you graduate"
The entire thing is bizarre (though possibly true for some degrees I don't want to even think about at some colleges I don't think about), but that "still relevant by the time you graduate".
You lost me at "It would seem". You completely lost me at "the cost of college". The cost of college is the cost to pay the salaries of the profs & the admin and the cost of libraries, gardening, security, and in some colleges, the cost of expensive laboratories. Textbooks? A pittance, esp in the Digital Age.
Well, it certainly is a bit of a class gatekeeper. The benefit may be like I said - you could end up friends or at least acquaintances with people you'd otherwise never have a chance to be in a room with. Is this fair or good? Open to debate. I think many people agree that for a lot of good jobs, it's not what you know but who you know.
You might have misunderstood my point - I was talking about what you get a lot of use out of after college, not what effort or time you put into while in college. This is extremely broad brush strokes based on how degrees were used as requirements for getting hired, but also how many people I know getting hired that way aren't using what they learned in their degree. And also how the vast majority of what I learned in my degree isn't used now. I might be a bit blinkered being in IT, but all my classes on Windows 2000 and CISCO were never used in any job, my start was with WinXP SP2 and now we're on Win11. And there's very little that's the same in any interaction with the OS say. The very general idea of a management system, or some of the networking concepts still apply, but we don't even use class based networks anymore and GPOs are being phased out. Just as an example. On the nix side, the only think relevant from my RH 7.3 classes is bash. A lot of the general concepts apply though, but they're very general theory stuff.
Given how the cost of tuition has greatly outpaced the general rate of inflation over the past several decade, I would think there could be a lot of ways to bring down the costs of college.
Administrative bloat is real.
And with some knowledge around that - if you google - some is entirely bloat, but more than you might think is new issues (cyberliability / hacking / ransomware / info stealing and all the regulations to try and prevent it) as well as general new regulations. Professors are often poorly placed or just won't spend time securing their IT infrastructure, they often can't help with mental health crisis, potential transportation management/costs (parking, busses, etc), sexual assult, just go down the list of things colleges either by choice or by law take a lot more seriously than they did in like 1960. I don't know when this started, but all the fire alarm tests and inspections cost money and time too. You need special fire department and facilities employees to do them. Same for chemical lab safety - go down the list. And all these support staff add to administrative bloat because you need HR, management, planning, and auditing for all of them. Go back 150 years and it was a lot cheaper case they didn't do any of that, but you get the Curies desks that way too(and dead researchers).
Part of this is that tuition used to be far more subsidized. The cost of EVs didn't jump way over the cost of inflation, the government stopped providing the $7,500 subsidy. I would guess that was a big part from the 1970s-2000ish. The last 25 years it goes back to a lot of what I said above - IT both in terms of computers, internet access, staff to deal with that entirely new huge area, staff to deal with the new online threat landscape since 2015 when colleges started taking ransomware etc seriously... This is huge, but I would question the interest of students in a college run mostly without computers a la 1980 style. I bet many would question the usefulness of the education.
No, there is a responsible, correct and legal way to 'give it back'. If someone choses to go the no pay route, then that person is much different than the Timeshare scam industry. Honoring a contract that a person signed is important, not doing so only shows that person is basically in the same pool.
