More and more I've been thinking about doing something like this myself. Originally I had the idea of getting a conversion van to travel with, something like a RoadTrek or a Sportsmobile. I was thinking about using the conversion van for overnights where I was between timeshares or for when traveling to places that don't have any timeshares.
But the more I think about the cost of doing that, the more I wonder if simply sticking to timeshares full-time would be more cost effective, with the occasional hotel or motel stays thrown in when necessary.
If I did full-time I would probably only do it for a couple of years. I'm in my mid-40s now and at some point I would like to own my own place, but for now I just want to travel. So if instead of spending tens of thousands on a Conversion Van, if I just put that towards my timeshare costs, it might prove to be more cost effective.
What I'd like to do is hash out the most economical way to achieve what I want - say, for example, keeping my accommodation costs to $2K or less per month. Right now, during winter I spend less than that to remain in the Southeast all winter so I figured it was do-able the rest of the year as well. I use a lot of Last Call rentals on RCI in addition to the points I own.
Currently, I own DVC, Wyndham and Royal Holiday. I'm thinking that if I augmented what I already own with Worldmark and, maybe, RCI points, then that might give me the flexibility to take advantage of their various "last call" type of transactions where weeks use less points the closer they are booked to the travel date.
I don't have VIP with Wyndham and I have no intention of sinking that kind of money into them, but maybe picking up additional Wyndham points just for depositing to RCI might be worthwhile too. Of course, one option which occurred to me is taking them up on their Discovery program option at some point. Since that program is good for a few years (right??), that might be just all the time I need as a VIP.
And for the RCI points, I know there's someone running a temporary rental membership for RCI Points, right? One of my big issues is that I don't want to be stuck with too many timeshares once I decide to scale back my traveling.
Do any of you have any thoughts on this? I was thinking about starting a new thread for the purposes of hashing out what would be the most efficient way to full-time, but since we are already discussing full-timing here I didn't want to duplicate the topic.