What has inspired this conversation about timeshares? Well, number one, I get questions inside of my emails all the time of people that’s looking to buy timeshares. And I tell them absolutely, positively not. People keep telling me, Anton, I’m going over to Vegas and they want to be able to. They just want me to sit there and look at the timeshares and look at this presentation of a timeshare.

And then I can get some free tickets, or I can get a free hotel night, or I can get tickets to a show, Anton, they just want me to sit through this presentation, and then I can get it in the timeshare. Absolutely not. If you cannot afford to go on that vacation without having to go sit through a timeshare presentation thinking that they don’t have high pressure sales tactics in order to get you to sign up, if you want to go on vacation to go and listen to a timeshare, then you probably need to realign your priorities and save a little bit more before you go on a vacation in the first place.

But timeshares, people ask me all the time, Anton, should I get into a timeshare? Anton, my girlfriend is telling me that we need to get a timeshare. Anton, Anton. Anti, anti, anti. And then almost as though the algorithm was listening to my conversation, I get a video that pops up on my algorithm that basically speaks about the dark side of timeshares. Go ahead and take a look, y’all.

Nearly 440,000 transactions and ten and a half billion dollars in total industry sales in 2022. A 30% rise in prices in just five years. That’s the timeshare industry. It was really a post pandemic winning sector. It was not incentives or lower prices by any means. It was consumers staying at home and consumers having more money and willing to spend it. Nearly 10 million us households own a timeshare.

But despite a massive industry and rapid growth in recent years, it all comes with a lot of controversy. They’re not held accountable for what they tell you prior to closing, so they can bold face, lie to you and do whatever they have to do to make the sale. And who cares if they hurt you? Websites like Timeshare users Group and Redweek. com list timeshares for resale, many of them for free.

But few consumers know about them. And companies rely on that lack of awareness. The actual reality is that timeshare depreciates between 90 and 100% the moment you sign that piece of paper. And if that were true and common knowledge, or the salesman presented that in the sales presentation. Not a single person would buy another timeshare. Why would I want to share? I don’t even like reits personally. That’s just me personally.

I don’t even like reits. Why would I want to share a piece of property with a bunch of people and I can only use it in certain parts of the year? Somebody said it in the chat. Hold on, let me find it. What did they say? Hold on. It was Brie powered, or is it bry power? He says, I used to work for Westgate in Orlando at the pool bar.

The amount of people that got finessed buying timeshares is insane. It is not an investment. He goes on to say a little bit later inside of the chat, chat lives matters goes on to say, oh, and good luck trying to get out of the timeshare once you buy it. Throwing money away. This is Sheila Wagner. She took her first vacation in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, in May of 2020.

During her trip, she was invited to a timeshare presentation with Capital Vacations, one of the largest privately owned timeshare companies in the US. We love the place we were staying, and it was 2020. So we were told that they were offering a deal where they would give you double the amount of points for signing up for $31,000 and one $700 in annual maintenance fees. Sheila got 300,000 annual timeshare points.

You paid $31,000, and you have to pay $1,700 in annual maintenance fees. How many people is a part of this timeshare that’s paying $1,700 in annual. Man, you can’t. Ain’t no way in the world that you can convince me to sign up for that deal just because you went on vacation and you had a good time. Somebody bust you down on vacation, and now you want to stay there forever.

You got this euphoric moment where you going to go over there and you want to own a piece of the american dream, and you going to pay $1,700 in maintenance and $31,000. Jesus Christ. Unreal. Dollars in annual maintenance fees. Sheila got 300,000 annual timeshare points. What is the points? Traditionally, timeshares have been sold as fixed or floating weeks. Today, it’s mostly a point system. The industry has made it very, very clear that today’s consumer wants flexibility, wants the ability to go different locations each and every year.

And the point model that almost all major developers have adopted reflects that. Shortly after going back home, Sheila tried to book a trip and soon realized the destinations that she had hoped for weren’t an option. After many calls with capital vacations, she was told she had to upgrade for another $42,000 to be able to use her points in the way that she wanted. Now, I know I’m a C student, and my mental math may be math, but 42 and 31, an additional $42,000 and $31,000 is what, 73.

$73,000 in payments and $1,700 a month in maintenance. Good God. You can buy a place for that. You can literally go and buy a place for that, airbnb it out or rent it out on a short term or long term rental basis and still own it and have equity in whatever place you decide to buy. Good God. You paying over $70,000 to be able to be a part of a point system.

Jesus Christ. She says capital vacations even promised to buy back her points to cover the cost of the upgrade if she put it on her credit card. She later found out that wasn’t true and had to resort to other measures to pay off her new loan. Interest rate being 15%. As you can imagine, that’s huge. So the only thing I could do was borrow money from my 401, my retirement.

All because you fell in love with a place and a destination on vacation. You borrow money from your retirement. You all can’t be this crazy. You all cannot be this crazy to participate in these timeshares. Good God. Under no circumstance do you draw from your order to pay for a timeshare and you getting finesse of 15% interest. This look like this is worse than a payday loan. To pay off the $42,000 loan, her maintenance fees have now surpassed $5,000, well above the national average of nearly 1200.

I even told Capital if I won the lottery, the first thing I would do is buy their company and fire all of them. I could retire if I had my money back from this, but I can’t retire right now because of this situation that I’m in. You can’t even control how high the maintenance fees go. So her maintenance fees is now $5,000 a year. Whoo. Whoa. Good God.

You all still want to own a timeshare? All right, you go ahead and you do what you want to do. Let’s continue. Capital Vacations manages 170 of the roughly 1500 timeshare resorts nationwide. Nearly half of the just over 200,000 units in the United States are in Florida, Hawaii, and California. Basis. Some of the biggest hotel brands like Marriott and Hilton have been in the timeshare business since the timeshare piece of the business, it was smaller.

It was arguably less profitable, more capital intensive, and had a lower growth rate than the hotel business that we know today. So in 2011, Marriott International spun off its timeshare business, and in 2017, Hilton and Wyndham followed suit. Basically, the hotel brand company said, we are the franchiseor. We own the brands. Let’s let someone else, in this case, the timeshare companies, grow our brand on our behalf, and they pay us a license fee or a royalty fee to do so.

In 2021, Wyndham Destinations acquired travel and Leisure, which is now its parent company. This is just one of the many consolidations that’s occurred over the past decade. Wyndham is going to make about $90 million from TNL, and that’s about 13% of Wyndham’s adjusted earnings profile as a combined company, Hilton. The license fee that HGV pays is going to be about $140,000,000, all variable. And that’s about four and a half percent of Hilton’s earnings.

The largest privately owned timeshare company, Westgate Resorts, has an Westgate baby annual revenue of $1. 5 billion. The 2012 documentary Queen of Versailles spotlighted Jackie Siegel, the wife of David Siegel. Have y’all ever heard of David Siegel and Jackie Siegel? I think it’s still on Netflix. There was this documentary, and everything was going broke because of the 2008 crisis, right? And they were building this huge mega mansion that was basically a replica of another mega mansion that they had seen over in Versailles, and they was calling her the queen of Versailles because they were building it here.

And he acquired his fortune. He’s largely considered the timeshare king because he acquired his fortune off of building a timeshare company. Now, obviously, back in 2008, during a recession before, when they had first started filming this, they weren’t able to finish the house because there was a crisis that was happening in the recession, right? Which means that the first thing that people start cutting out and the first thing that people started reneging on is anything that had to do with leisure or travel because they were in survival mode.

One of the reasons I don’t invest in airlines, one of the reasons I don’t invest in hotels, right? Because people start canceling their timeshares, and it’s called Queen of Versailles. That’s correct. Osriel. And they were building this back in 2008 or before 2008, before the recession, the economy crashed. They had to pause everything. And then once the economy started picking back up, they started continuing. I think they did like an update recently, probably within the last few years, they started back, going back to building, and they wanted to actually finish the man.

Ten. And she had put all of these millions and millions of dollars worth of tacky art and trinkets and stuff that she was picking out to be a part of it. And she got older and she was all busted and anything like that. But this man is largely considered the king of timeshares. And he had this greedy, gold digging wife type chick who then was shooting this thing called the queen of Versailles, and she was building this mega mansion that was basically a replica of what it is that she had experienced overseas.

Founder of Westgate Resorts. I’m a 43 year old mother of eight who lives in a 90,000 square foot home in Florida modeled after the palace of Versailles. I got the private jet experience here in my living room so I could enjoy my cavity. Our first class. This is horrible. This is absolutely horrible. According to a study out of the University of Central Florida, 85% of timeshare owners regret their purchase.

But getting out of one is not easy. Even when paying off a loan, the owner is perpetually accountable for an ever increasing maintenance fee. The Better Business Bureau has received over 3000 complaints for Hilton grand vacations, Wyndham destinations, and Marriott Vacations worldwide. Typically, a mortgage company will say, sure, if you pay off the loan, then you can get out of the timeshare. But the timeshare companies sometimes are also the lending entities, so they own the mortgage, and that gives them more flexibilities to find a way for you to curtail your exit and pay off the mortgage or not all at the same time.

When the housing crisis hit in 2008, Americans owning timeshares felt the pressure. In a 2009 quarter one earnings call, Marriott said it had $28 million worth of contract cancellations. Industrywide, owners defaulting on payments more than doubled from 2007 to 2009. This pressure gave rise to the timeshare exit industry llcs formed, allowing owners to transfer their unwanted timeshare deeds over for a few thousand dollars. But many of these exit companies that formed at the height of the financial crisis turned out to be empty shell companies.

The resorts didn’t catch wind of this until maintenance. They realized they were sending 2000 maintenance fee bills to the same address in Delaware, and no one’s answering the phone. And so that really just rocked the industry that they’ve closed that loophole because it just got absurd and it’s absolutely crippled some of these companies. With thousands and thousands of defaulted ownerships, timeshare exit companies are still found all over the Internet.

But nowadays, Rogers says that the strategy of these exit companies is often just telling owners to default on payments and the owner is overjoyed. Oh, my goodness. I finally got out of my timeshare. This company did exactly what they told me they were going to do and got getting me out of my timeshare, not realizing that all they did was stop paying and roll the dice. The US Department of Justice has made efforts to curb exit company scams like this in November of 2022, or this in Washington state between 2015 and 2021.

Personal finance author and radio host David Ramsay allegedly received more than $30 million to promote Timeshare Exit team, a company later known as Reed Hyde and Associates. I’ve been recommending these guys for the past three years, and I am so, yeah, I remember that. I remember when Dave Ramsey, they was doing the sponsorship because they was running ads on Dave Ramsey. That’s why I’m very careful about even entertaining some people that want to run ads over here on a millionaire morning show because I would never advocate for something that I don’t already use for myself.

And so, yeah, he got caught up in a lot of that and got a lot of flak from it. Listen, the point of this whole thing is, and I’m personally telling you this myself, never ever, under any circumstance, let me say this again, under any circumstance, ever sign up for timeshare. Never ever, under any circle. If you are subscribed here, if you are a bag chaser, make sure you tap into the Patreon link is in the description as well as pinned to the top of the chat.

If you are a bag chaser, if you are a part of my Patreon, if you are part of Stock club, if you ever come to any of my meetups, if you are subscribed to this channel, don’t ever, under any circumstance sign up for a timeshare. If you call me and you say, Anton, I signed up for a timeshare, what do you think about it? I’m going to tell.

You’re a fool. I’m telling you definitively right now. If you are my people and you’re asking me, don’t even ask, do not ever, under any circumstance even attend a meeting where they say that they’re going to give you free tickets or a free trip or free flight or a free hotel or free something to the show or whatever. Don’t go to any seminars. Don’t go sign up. Don’t go to observe it.

Don’t sit there with your girlfriend. Don’t do nothing. Walk away. Do not ever even entertain the idea. Don’t even be tempted by the idea of doing something related to a timeshare, ever. Okay, Anton, you aren’t allowing free thinking. No, I’m not going to let you all crash out like that. I’m not going to let you crash out like that. We’re going to do it the right way, all right? And ever.

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