Original Message:
No advance payment of maint. fee is the exception, NOT the rule... (by KC):
scotts320 wrote:Could someone out there tell me where you can own that doesn't require you to have MF's paid for the year, before you bank.
I am certainly NO friend or fan of RCI (I despise RCI, in fact), but I can still easily understand a resort policy of not being able to "bank" a week whose maintenance fee for the deposited year has not yet been paid. Many resorts will allow you to pay in advance if you choose to do so, even long before bills are issued. Habitual "exchangers" (among whom I personally do NOT number) do so all the time.
If you think about this objectively, from a business perspective, if someone could "deposit" a week whose maintenance fee is not yet paid, and then obtains and uses a week in "exchange" --- but then later fails to pay their maintenance fee to the resort for the "deposited" week, then the resort won't allow ANYONE (...including RCI) to assign or occupy the unit that year. So, in that hypothetical scenario, the "deposited" week would not be able to be used by RCI at all, either to rent out themselves (...which they would likely do if it's a really good week) or to offer to a RCI member as an "exchange" (...if it was a "weaker" week, which doesn't have very good rental potential). In that scenario, RCI would have just "given away" a week as an exchange (... "given" meaning besides the $169 exchange fee RCI previously collected), but left unable to do anything at all with the originally "banked" week, now "held hostage" by the resort for unpaid fees.
In other words, RCI is understandably not enthusiastic about risking any member getting "free" use of an "exchange" week while RCI itself potentially gets left "holding the bag" of a deposit which RCI then cannot later either rent out or assign to a member as an exchange. Equally understandably, no resort will allow use or occupancy by ANYONE of any unit week whose fees have not been paid on the unit for that particular use year.