The ideas people have for dealing with a timeshare they’ve been stuck with are many—and come in all levels of practicability, from decent to awful. Among the worst of the latter are the types we associate with ostriches: burying your head in the sand and just pretending you weren’t pressured by timeshare goons into making that unfortunate purchase in the first place. One form this tactic takes is when people decide to stop paying their timeshare maintenance fees.
It’s not a good idea.
On one level it’s understandable why you’d do it.The memory of the timeshare sales pitch can be so awful that some people have actually claimed to have exhibited symptoms similar to PTSD afterward. And it’s no help that, even once you’ve paid off the loan to buy the right to use the timeshare in the first place, these maintenance fees keep coming—and, worse, increasing, apparently without limit. It can feel like the best course of action would be to just stop paying them, to ignore or avoid the whole situation. (You’re not using the timeshare at any rate, and you’d rather go to, say, Paris than Fort Lauderdale this year, and how will you afford that plane ticket if you pay the $1500 maintenance fee on the Fort Lauderdale timeshare?) What’s the worst that could happen?
Well, plenty.
To begin with, when you were pressured into signing that timeshare contract, you made a binding agreement to pay these maintenance fees. (That’s how the law sees it for now, at any rate.) Maintenance fees are (supposedly) the money that the resort uses to keep up the property. If you don’t pay them, you’re in breach of contract, plain and simple. And the way our society has decided to make contracts work is by ensuring that those who break them incur some form of penalty for doing so.
What kinds of penalty? For one thing, interest will likely be added to whatever you owe. How much depends on what the contract said. But say your maintenance fee has gone up to $1000 for the year, and you choose to ignore it. If the contract stipulates a 10% interest add-on fee for each month that payment is late, by the time you’ve avoided paying for just one month, you now owe $1,100. Now keep going, month by month, and you owe more than twice that by the time a year has passed—plus that next year’s maintenance fee is coming due….
Meanwhile, the timeshare company will likely have contacted a collections firm to get that payment out of you, so you’ll be dealing with a new form of harassment. And then, if you still don’t pay, the timeshare company can move to “foreclose” on your interest. This means that not only do you lose all the money you paid to “own” the timeshare in the first place, of which you may now recoup nothing (not that you’d have gotten much of it back at any rate), but you take a huge hit to your credit score in the process. There are better ways to deal with timeshare companies. If you’re looking to end your association with a timeshare company—in Fort Lauderdale, Florida or elsewhere—let The People’s Advocate fight for you. We take on timeshare companies to hold them accountable for their high-pressure sales tactics and fraudulent practices. Don’t find yourself subject to losing money on “properties” into which you’re forced to pour significant amounts of your hard-earned money. Contact us for more details.