Why give up and stop annual payments is not enough to get out of vacation club/membership?
Why give up and stop annual payments is not enough to get out of vacation club/membership?
So, my relative was given a vacation membership long ago. That membership should cost initially to buy in, but she was given for free. She only need to pay annual fee. Seem like good deal.
Now she is trying to give that membership away for free because she doesn't like travelling to that place anymore, and don't want to pay fee.
So i wonder, why just not cancel it. Stop paying to let it cancel by itself like your netflix account.
Sounds like a timeshare and you cannot cancel those, you own it and the annual fee is required. It’s more like taxes.
38Yes, your aunt has (probably) signed up for what's essentially a scam. This is their whole business model, they know timeshares sound better than they end up being, so they intentionally trick people into signing contracts that are very difficult to get out of, so they can't just dump it the moment they realize they don't want it anymore.
20Timeshares are written up as if they were property. Property that she shares with other people and is contractually required to pay for the upkeep. It's basically a never ending money generator for the owners. Think of it a hotel where all the rooms are rented out to people who agreed to pay for them no matter if they use it or not.
As the owner of "property" she has a few choices. First off read the contract.
The management company sometimes reserves the right to buy the property back. Usually a good option - the "Owner" loses money but gets out of the never-ending bills.
She can also sell/give the timeshare to somebody else on the timeshare selling site. This transfers the ownership to somebody else who might like it.
If the property has degraded in value because of lack of maintenance from the management she might be able to get out by civil lawsuit. This is unlikely as most timeshare companies do exactly the bare minimum to meet their contractual obligations.
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She probably has a contract. you can not just stop paying things because you don't like it anymore, you have to follow the terms of that contract. Otherwise every payment you skipp is a debt to the other party and hey can sue you for breaking the contract and for backpay of the payments you skipped.
In your example with netflix, the contract you enter into when signing up for their service specifically states, that you can leave it monthly and Netflix lets you do that by not paying anymore.
This is part of Netflix's concept as a service provider and doesn't mean its the same in other services.
19Agree with other commenters this sounds like a time share. This last week tonight is a pretty interesting watch about the way they hustle people.
13I’m guessing the underlying question is, “What function would require you to keep paying?” The answer is: Civil court.
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