They’ll tell you it’s an investment. They’ll say you can recoup your money—maybe even make some money! They’ll convince you they’re on your side, here—this is a win-win. You can’t go wrong with a timeshare! (Or a “vacation club” or whatever they choose to call it.) But it’s all b.s. These timeshare companies aren’t trying to help you improve your net worth. They’re only in it for themselves. How do we know? Because otherwise they wouldn’t treat people the way they do.
It starts with the promise of free stuff. That’s just a way to get you there. It costs them almost nothing, and they get to start in with the pressure. They use tactics distilled over years of research done by low-down lousy jerks on what sorts of psychological torture work best. No kidding! It’s a science to these people—they use human psychology against ordinary people. For your benefit? Not a chance! They want to get something from you: your money. And they are perfectly willing to break you down to get it.
They take that up-front payment. $10,000 or $20,000. More. They offer you the financing, with an absurd interest rate (which, of course, they pocket). That ends up meaning that what you thought was going to be $10,000 ends up being more like $13,000 or more, depending on the rate and how quickly you manage to pay it off. And then: the maintenance fees. Already absurdly high—$500 on the low end, and increasing every single year. By year 10 you can expect them to have gone up by at least 40 percent. By then you could have gone to Europe for a family vacation for the same amount instead of going back to Fort Lauderdale (lovely though it is) for the tenth year in a row.
And if you fail to pay that maintenance fee, even once, the timeshare company can foreclose on you or begin legal proceedings to wrest your money away from you. Just because you were pressured into buying a phony “property” interest by someone who lied to you at every step of the process.
Well, The People’s Advocate is here to fight the good fight. We hold greedy timeshare companies’ toes to the fire. We are dedicated to doing battle with the timeshare lobby one case at a time—and the best way to do that is by helping individuals tricked and cajoled into timeshare contracts to get out of them. Contact us today for a free information session on how we can help you.