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Growing up my mom’s frequent-traveler-family — parents, grandparents, aunts/uncles — were always pretty big on time shares. If we weren’t going to stay with family on a vacation, 90% of the time we were staying in a time share.

My grandparents have a whole network of timeshares they frequent. They were teachers, so it’s not like they earned baller salaries in their working years, but they had a good pension plan and saved well. Since they live in Chicago, they just leave during the winter. People always seemed stunned by this and I often have to repeat myself several times to make this register. Yes. They just leave for about three months out of the year, because EW cold.

They travel the country visiting friends and staying at time shares along the way. Somewhere in their travel stories about how my grandma was upset that my grandpa drove for so many hours without stopping or the slideshow of the four million photos she took, there is always mention of at least one time share room that was totes amazing because it had a coffee grinder or some other thing that one can appreciate when you’ve reached a point where you actually dedicate your life to appreciating life, and marveling at how much you love a surprise coffee grinder.

The thing about the time share set-up, though, is that the initial good deal has a mountain of fine print. Weird systems of points and complicated rules about when you can and can’t go and how you book it and blah blah blah it’s kind of a pain in the ass. They have annual maintenance fees, which are an extra special treat. “Hey you bought this thing. Except that you will have to keep giving us money for the rest of forever.”

When my family went to Mexico a few years ago, my mom spent half of the trip arguing with the resort. My grandparents are in the process of getting rid of some of theirs, too, because while they don’t plan to travel, there’s a point at which it stops being a good deal and starts being a nuisance.

As far as I know, my parents ultimately lost a time share, through some shady dealings. That is, they owned one. Supposedly sold it, but the sale went awry and they got nothing in return.

From what I can tell, trying to sell a timeshare by yourself sounds like an awful idea. The resort has no interest in helping you, because they only want to sell time they own, and it’s hard to figure out where exactly you go to sell something like that because people will generally go direct to the resort to buy.

I’ve never personally owned or sold a time share, but my understanding of it makes it sound daunting. It’s not like the resort (who has an abundance of shares of their own to sell) is gong to let you pop a FSBO sign in the lawn. What’s more, if you’re buying one, it seems like the better deal would be with an owner trying to sell than the resort proper, correct? It sounds majorly stressful. (A fact with my majorly chill mother and former real-estate-agent father confirm. Yes, ground-breaking news you read here first, folks: selling time shares is stressful.)

You can do your own homework accordingly, but Resort Management Associates has some pretty solid testimonials of people who successfully worked with them, and their office hours aren’t quite 24/7, but basically always. I’m not sure who feels the need to call people at 5am, but they’re in if you do. That’s pretty legit customer service.

There are plenty of easier ways to travel comfortably on a budget.