In 2006 my wife and I had twins that were just old enough to travel. We decided to look into timeshare as a vacation method, realizing hotel rooms were not going to hack it. We took a 4 day intro package at Ko Olina and fell in love with the place. Although we were tempted to buy, we decided to pass and learn about timeshare.
We stumbled across TUG and spent the next year learning and tracking timeshare resales.
Back then a Ko Olina week was going for upwards of $60K from Marriott and $20K on the resale market.
At that time, we were still pretty green, so we ignored TUG's second commandment "Thou shalt buy where you will stay often". We bought a Branson Willow Ridge week and a Desert Springs Villas II week. Our intention was to exchange these for prime Ko Olina weeks, while having traders with low maintenance fees. This did not work out very well, as our target weeks were 2BR. In Summer. In Hawaii. It took lots of planning and checking every single day for exchanges. Based on that alone, our intro to Marriott was not that great. We got some good trades, and a lot of gray hair waiting for them. But then again we were trying to squeeze diamonds from stone. We ended up selling those weeks, taking a bit of a loss (about $2000). This wasn't based just on what we paid vs sold. I included the value of weeks we exchanged into vs what it would have cost to rent into those weeks. The closing fees for buying and selling really added up, BTW...
Around 2010, the bottom fell out of the timeshare market. Ko Olina weeks were now $10K or less resale. So we purchased two weeks at $9500 each.
Then between 2015-2017 we purchased three Waiohai weeks for $5000 each. We rented our Ko Olina weeks every year, netting around $1K each.
We've gotten value from our Waiohai each year because we pay about $2200 in MF and renting into Waiohai would be about $2800-$3100 per week.
The Ko Olina weeks are worth about $7000 per week resale and the Waiohai are worth around $8000 a week resale.
So, we are going into 2020 at a net positive for our ownership.
Meaning that if we sold them all today, while we would have less money than we spent to get them (after selling fees), we have gotten value from rental income and savings of MF vs renting.
It hurts to put out $11K every January for MF, especially with MF ever increasing. Credit card reward points earned help counter that pain.
But we are guaranteed to have our consecutive 3 weeks in the summer every year.
Renting the Ko Olina units are easy as can be.
I don't have to deal with Interval (my membership has long expired).
For us, ownership has been fantastic. Even if the prices dropped by half again, we would not be complaining.
We found the way to make our once lofty goals maintainable. It works for our case, but probably not for many other cases.
When our kids leave the nest, maybe our goal will change to stay at different hard-to-get locations every year.
If that happens, we would probably not be exchanging our high-MF weeks, instead renting them out and renting into the places we want to stay.
In a case like that it might make more sense to just sell our weeks, and just rent.
So we tried it both ways - first ignoring important TUG guidelines, then following them.
What did not work well:
Buying a "low cost, low MF" trader and trying to exchange into difficult locations
Buying into a location that we had to give away for free (Willow Ridge)
What worked well:
Having the same plan to execute year after year
Renting until we were able to afford to execute the purchase plan
Buying into a property only after tracking it for at least a year (every deal we thought we'd never see again, we saw again...)
Buying into the location we wanted to stay at
Buying into a location that will not be difficult to unload
I can honestly say that all of the advice I received on TUG was incredibly helpful, while everything we were told by Marriott salespeople was wildly inaccurate.
It's not often that Good vs Evil is so evident.