u/Poisonmonkee

Before everyone assumes this is another story about getting ripped off by a timeshare place, just listen. It's a bit of a read so apologies and TIA

We went to a presentation after getting promised some free stuff including tickets to some local attractions and a free week somewhere ($1500 value, apparently). We DID NOT go into the presentation wanting to buy anything. In fact, our salesman even said exactly this - I know you made a pact not to buy anything.

Honestly, everybody was extremely nice and very polite and our salesman was personable, didn't pressure us whatsoever and was very professional. It was honestly a "fun" experience going through the presentation, answering questions and taking the tour.

So when it came to the properties themselves, the cabins were VERY well appointed. Like, nicer than my current house. And huge. The property itself was also huge and while It didn't seem like super "convenient" it was very well done and everyone there seemed happy to be there.

The presentation room was only about 15% filled and while we were there, two other families purchased. Fake? Who knows. But seemed legit.

When we got to pricing, we were expecting it to be very expensive and we were right. Each "bedroom" is considered one "week" of vacation. So a 2 bedroom is either 2 weeks or 1 week with 2 bedrooms and so forth.

They tried to sell us a 4 bedroom and it was like 72,000 total + 1475 yearly fee and 20% upfront and the rest on a 27% percent loan. lol. In fact all of their financing was 27%+ APR for every option. no wonder everyone gets approved.

After about 30 minutes of explaining why none of their options made sense (the 2 bedroom was about half that price and they were sold out of the one bedroom), the manager came over and came up with some other options. We could purchase a recently "vacated" property (don't know the exact terminology, but essentially, we were told an owner upgraded and there was a 2 bedroom available at a fraction of the price). That option still needed 15k up front which we declined.

After some back and forth, they finally landed on something actually interesting– a two bedroom resold condo (at a discount) of $9000 total that we could use starting 2027 (fine with us) but only every other year. Which was also fine with us. You could also roll over a week if you wanted to one week once a year. Also, fine. The 1545/year fee was also only paid once every two years.

If we paid 1100 now, and 3500 in the next 90 days, we could finance the rest for 3 years at zero percent interest. Roughly $137/month for 3 years.

The rest of the info: 150 to book at any other Westgate and 249 to use their partner hotels around the world.

It actually seemed like a good deal, so we said fuck it okay. After we signed everybody acted like this was a crazy deal and they'd never seen anything this good. Probably just saying that, but also they seemed to be genuinely surprised we got what we did:

So the numbers:

$9000 total cost +1500/year maintenance (paid every other year)

$1100 up front on credit card

$3500 to be paid in the next 30-90 days

the remainder 0% APR for 3 years.

FOR

TWO bedrooms (or two weeks) every other year, starting in 2027 with the ability to roll over into one week a year.

I'm sure we got fucked on the maintenance, but 1500 for one week at a nice resort seems either about right or cheap depending on where you go.

Thoughts?