In my family, the jury is still out on whether a Disney Vacation Club is the answer to our future Disney trips with a growing family. It's become increasingly difficult to share a room for a week with 2 teens. And while we always say we'll just deal with it for a week, we usually leave our vacation wondering if in the future we should invest in a vacation club.
Future trips in the next couple of years will also include our oldest daughter and our granddaughter. Now that brings us to 6 total. At that point, just a room is no longer an option.
Disney's Vacation Club operates on a point system. The minimum amount of points you can purchase is 160 for a cost of just over $16,000. The vacation club is good for 50 years and can be transferred to your children or whoever else you want to leave it to.
For that amount of points, you can spend 10 nights in Disney per year, according to the Disney Vacation Club person I spoke with. You choose your vacation club resort based on how many people you need to accommodate. Depending on the time of year, that is how the points are charged. You'll be charged more points on weekends than during the week and peak season will also cost you more points.
Then there's the maintenance fees. They will cost you about $65 a month.
You also have to factor in the cost of financing the vacation club unless you plan to pay cash. If you don't use a home equity loan or line of credit to pay for your vacation club, you can expect to pay about 10% interest on the financing. OUCH!
So while doing my research and seeing the cost of this investment rising rapidly, I decided to check out booking a suite at one of the deluxe hotels that would accommodate six of us. I was again surprised when I saw the price range from $3,500 to $8,000! OUCH again!
Fortunately, our granddaughter is only 3 months old so we still have at least a couple years to make this decision.