Wyndham maintenance fee payments are monthly but I have heard of a few people who pay theirs annually. I'm guessing those people might have converted fixed weeks or fixed weeks. Wyndham doesn't sell fixed weeks but there are still some some people who have fixed weeks and you can pick them up resale. I've seen more fixed weeks for sale at the resorts in Hawaii than anywhere else.
As to reading negative remarks, there are several reasons for them.
Typically those people simply didn't buy enough points to be able to do much with them. To make matters worse many spent the big bucks to buy developer and didn't know about resale. Many of us have been where they are and it isn't a happy moment when you realize that not only did you spend way too much but you still don't have enough points to do all that much. Instead of moving on and finding a solution they choose to be bitter and gripe about it every chance they get. Many people here on TUG found the solution and accept that although they paid through the nose for their first purchase it brought them into the Wyndham system and they learned from there. I liken it to paying for an Ivy league degree in a field where a community college degree gets you the same job and promotions. Live and learn.
You needed to look at where and when you know you would like to go in the next couple of years and see how many points you will need to do that. Many people are extremely picky about their accommodations for their vacations. Only the best of the best will do for them. I see this over and over in the Facebook groups. They only want the newest resorts and ones that offer the most amenities. Many of us here on TUG know how to get the most out of our points. And many of us have some of the older resorts that we particularly like. When a new resort comes into the system it comes in with it's own point chart and it remains the same. If a resort were to add more units of a different type they could do that but the rest of the chart remains unchanged. New resorts are always more points to book than resorts that have been in the system longer or the longest.
I'll use Bonnet Creek, Star Island and Cypress Palms to start with for my examples of how many owners maximize the number of points they own. We like Star Island and have a friend who likes Cypress Palms. We both sometimes stay at Bonnet Creek but try to only stay in the lower point seasons and Sunday-Thursday night stays as Friday and Saturday night stays are more points at all the resorts. When you look at the point charts pay attention to how the weeks for Prime, High and Value aren't the same at all resorts. Say I was planning a trip to Orlando and wanted to go when I could make my points stretch but I also wanted to go when it was cold where I lived. I might look at weeks 9 and 10 which for 2020 are roughly the last week of February and the first week of March. And I want a two bedroom unit. For Bonnet Creek I would need 448,000 points, for Star Island and Cypress Palms only 308,000 points.
Next I start looking at what I could do with that 140,000 points I saved by not staying at Bonnet Creek. I've wanted to stay at the Smoky Mountain resort and I see that week 20, the week ending in Memorial Day weekend, is the last week of high season. Or the high season for Westwinds in Myrtle Beach goes clear through week 22 so I could stay the week of Memorial Day or the week after. We've stayed at Westwinds before and haven't been to Myrtle Beach in a few years so either one will be good. I know the weather will be nice so I'm in and start working on making my decision about which resort we should pick.
For the week at Smoky Mountains I will be short 8,000 points and for any one of the 3 weeks I'm considering at Westwinds I will be short 14,000 points if I want a two bedroom again. In the standard booking window 10-3 months prior to check in I can rent the points I'm short since I only need a portion of the points for the last night's stay. That is the restriction on renting points in the standard booking window. I will pay $12 per thousand for those points so $96-$168 for the additional points depending on which resort I select. If I wait until the express booking window, three months or less, to book that week I can borrow points from my next use year which costs me nothing. I go ahead and book my reservation for whichever resort I've decided upon for my third week of vacation time and rent the points. When it gets down to the 3 month express window I see there is still availability so I cancel the reservation for that week and am refunded what I paid to rent the points. You can cancel a reservation up until 15 full days before the day it starts and get all your points back. Or you can pay $49 for reservations up to 200,000 points, $69 for reservations up to 300,000 points and $99 for reservations over 300,000 points to protect your points and be able to cancel until the day of check in and get all your points back. Points protection can be purchased at any time before the 15 day window to cancel the reservation. Anyhow, I still have a free reservation transaction left so I'm not paying $19 to waste one by cancelling my original reservation and booking another reservation to be able to borrow points from my next use year instead of having to pay to rent them.
Bonnet Creek
Star Island
Cypress Palms
Smoky Mountains
Westwinds
I've seen people say that they want to keep their maintenance fees under $100 a month or not too much over that. Then they get Club Wyndham Access points or points at a resort with high maintenance fees because if they bought resale it was cheap or someone was giving it away. If you only have resale points your program fee is either $0.58 per thousand points or a minimum of $135 a year. So you would need to own a total of 233,000 points to be over the minimum program fee. But they could have learned a little more before they bought and got something with lower maintenance fees. Unless they needed the advantage that owning at a specific resort would give them. You get ARP, Advance Reservation Priority, at your home resort. Meaning you can book it at 13 months and other people can book it at 10 months. Club Wyndham Access points aren't deeded, instead you have a contract with Wyndham that gives you the use of x number of points a year. But that gives you access to inventory and resorts that are in CWA at 13 months. If you don't need the larger units, only studios, one or two bedroom units, and you aren't trying to book a high demand week like the week between Christmas and New Years you can usually find what you're looking for at 10 months or less. For some people it makes the best financial sense to own where maintenance fees are lower. For others who have very specific needs about when and where they will want to go, and maybe having a larger unit too, then it may be worth it to them to pay higher maintenance fees to make sure they get what they want.
Example 1: Say you had 154,000 Club Wyndham Access points. The current maintenance fees on CWA are $5.99 so you would pay $922.46 a year and because you didn't have enough points to be over the minimum program fee that would be $135 which brings the total up to 1057.46 or $88.12 a month. Or you had 224,000 CWA points so with the program fee that would be $1476.76 a year or $123.06 a month.
Example 2: Or instead you could have bought points at Grand Desert. I use this resort a lot in my examples because while it doesn't have the very lowest maintenance fees it does have maintenance fees in lower range and you can usually find good deals on resale points for Grand Desert. Buildings 1 and 2 pay $4.73 and building 3 pays $4.82 plus the program fee. So in buildings 1 or 2, if you owned 308,000 points which is more than enough to get you over the minimum program fee it would cost you $1635.48 or $136.29 a month.
You may be wondering why I used 154, 224k and 308k points in my examples. Wyndham does sell points in other increments but increments of 77k points are the most common. You get one free reservation transaction fee for every 77k points you own. They are $19 each if you don't have any free ones left and that is the price if you book online. It is more if you call in and have a vacation counselor, VC, do it for you.