If you’re past the deadline by which you might have been able to get your onerous timeshare contract cancelled, you’re probably curious about other ways to unload the week you’ve signed your money away for. The first thing you’re likely to do is look into the options for selling. Once that possibility has distressed you completely, you may consider that you’ve heard of other people donating their timeshares to charity. They get a tax break from it. There’s always that to fall back on, right?
Think again.
Charities may have an (unfair) reputation for accepting dregs the haves choose to give down to the have-nots, but we’re not talking about a gently-used Louis Vitton cowlneck, here. Clothes, furniture, even broken-down cars—these things are tangible, they are made of matter, and they can be twice-used, whether for wearing, sitting on, or smelting into raw materials for repurpose.
Timeshares are another thing altogether, a thing more ephemeral—a legal fiction cobbled together from ideas about property, time, and the average person’s whimsical desire to secure a future in leisure. They’re a wish and an expensive prayer. In other words, they are not a thing at all. The only possible benefit a charity may gain from a timeshare would be from its sale. And the person who donates the timeshare only gets a tax discount that would be a fraction of the market value of the timeshare’s sale.
Which puts you back at square one, minus a large portion of the (almost certainly tiny) sale proceeds.
And the same uncertainty about being able to sell a timeshare is what has made charities increasingly unlikely to accept them as donations in the first place. They aren’t stupid—and the charitable class for whose benefit they are working is almost certainly not, unfortunately, people who have been pressured into buying timeshares. They need to make money to buy food or housing or medical care for people who don’t have access to these things. No one can make that happen by being forced to pay ever-increasing maintenance fees on undesirable timeshares.
The only way out of a timeshare is the direct way, and the best way to do that is to do it in time. Contact us today—time is of the essence!—if you are having second thoughts about that timeshare you bought. We will look at the specifics of your case. We can draft an unassailable cancellation letter to ensure your freedom from the sale if we are given enough time—and we can look into the details of the sale if the cancellation period has passed. At The People’s Advocate, we are passionate about helping consumers fight back against the timeshare scam industry.