My wife Robyn and I love going on vacations. We like to get away and relax, sightsee, go to amusement parks and museums, and really enjoy seeing other places. We’re not rich, but we do take a few weeks each year to go to nice places and do those things. But as you know, vacations can be expensive. The cost of hotels and eating out keeps going up, year after year.

We live in Phoenix, Arizona. While it’s beautiful for most of the year, it gets HOT here in the summer. Our dream for after we retire is to escape the heat for a few weeks every summer. Staying in hotels for an extended period of time like that could be really expensive and somewhat uncomfortable. So how are we going to accomplish our dream?

The answer is…

We bought a lot of timeshares. The cost of lodging is fixed, and we don’t have to eat out if we don’t want to. In fact, we’ve bought more timeshares than we can use right now, because it’s a lot easier and cheaper for us to buy them now than it will be when we retire in a few years.

Because we have more timeshare weeks than we can use right now, we rent out several of them. We’re not looking to make a profit on them, and we’re definitely not looking to sell them. We would just like to cover some of the ongoing costs.

We have two type of timeshares: fixed weeks and points-based clubs. The fixed weeks are the “classic” scenario with the same unit for the same week each year. We have two of these: SeaTime in Ocean City, MD for the second week in August, and Orange Lake in Orlando (right behind Disney World) for the third week in March.

We also belong to four “points-based” resort groups—Wyndham, Bluegreen, Shell Vacations Club, and Diamond Resorts International. With these clubs, we can choose the resort location, the time of year, and the unit size and type that we want to use each year. These units can be reserved starting 10 to 11 months in advance. Popular resorts and popular weeks book up almost immediately, so we have to plan well in advance for those.