Episode 119 - The Disney Delusion: How We Almost Bought a Timeshare We Couldn’t Afford

In this episode, Paul shares a “crazy” story from his own financial past — the time he and Taryn almost bought a Disney Vacation Club timeshare when they absolutely could not afford it. With honesty and humor, he walks through how emotion, sales pressure, and financial delusion nearly led them into a long-term mistake — and the practical habits they use today to avoid those traps. As we enter Lent, this story becomes more than just a money lesson — it’s about slowing down, practicing discipline, and learning that sometimes the most spiritual word you can say with your finances is “no.” 

Transcript

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Paul, Welcome to Catholic money talk, where we talk about all things money and finance, and we try to do it through a lens of being Catholic, where our ultimate goal is to one day be in Heaven with the Lord. I am your host. Paul Scarfone, thank you for being here today. Welcome back to Catholic money talk. The title of today's episode, I'm calling it the Disney delusion, how we almost bought a timeshare we couldn't afford. And it's a crazy story, a story from our money past Terrence and mine, and it honestly still shocks me when I think about it, because it's one of those stories that could have gone very differently, and it could easily have been one of those financial decisions that followed us around for years. So I'm gonna tell you that story today. But before we do that, let's say a prayer in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen, Heavenly Father. We, thank you for this day. We, thank you for all the ways you love and bless us, Lord. We, thank you for the awesome plans that you have for us, the great future that you have. Help us to trust you, Lord, no matter what circumstance or situation we might find ourselves in, allow us to yield to you and to your Holy Spirit. Come O Holy Spirit. Fill us with courage and strength for what's ahead. We ask this all in Jesus name, amen, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. All right. Crazy story time, Disney time share. So this is a story from our money passed, taryn's in mind, and the hope is that it will be a encouragement. See, I'm trying to finish a book. I've been working on a book, and I made a quick reference to the story, and my wife, Taryn, who's helping me proofread it, as she's reading it, she said, You got to put the whole story in the book, because it's crazier the more I think about it. And and we it was just the other night we were talking about it, and, well, this is insane, like where our minds were in that moment. And thank you, Jesus, we avoided it. So, so I was looking up a few other details. So I actually, I went to my email and typed Disney Vacation Club in the search bar, and it came up a couple emails around that time, was April 2, 2010 and it I had emailed a written confirmation canceling the Disney Vacation Club, but that's what Disney calls their timeshares, Disney Vacation clubs, because it sounds better than timeshare, but let me set the scene. This is back in 2010 I was one year into working on my MBA. It was a two year program, and we were about 18 months into living in our house, our first home that we had. And in stories, previous podcast episodes, I've I've told the story. When we bought our house, we bought too much house. Our monthly take home pay at the time was about $4,000 so that's what we took home, not our gross our take home and our house payment was 2100 so that's more than half, right? More than 50% of our take home pay. That is insane. That is a lot of home payment for that income. And again, additionally, I had started my MBA, the bank I was working for at the time was going to reimburse me up to$5,000 per year. But I did have to pay the money up front, and I had to come up with a plan to do that, I didn't have money, and I didn't want to stick it on a credit card, so I applied for a student loan. We've done this totally different now, right? But, but this was before I learned, and I remember when I applied for the student loan, I was a little confused by it, because I was looking at the amount of the whole MBA program, not just applying for a year at a time. And so what happened was the school, the loan paid the school, and then they sent me a check, an overage for a few$1,000 because I applied for a larger amount than I needed, not just the semester. So there was an overage that came to me and and I put in the bank account, I'm like, I'll use that to, you know, to pay the next semester, whatever. That's a whole nother story. What happened to that money, but, but in the moment, because that money went into the bank, it felt like we had some margin in life, but deep down, I knew we didn't. So I'm a year into my MBA classes, and we're taking a little break. So we thought, let's go on a little vacation. My grandmother lived in far Florida, so our plan was to fly down and visit grandma. Taryn wanted to take the kids to Disney. So at the time, in 2010 we only had two kids, and we we actually knew we couldn't afford to go to Disney. Like to pay for the park pass. So Taran found a program. It was actually a pretty good deal. Where, if you put in some volunteer time in your local community, you were awarded with entry into a Disney park for a day. So Taryn signed us up to make some blankets for homeless people through a local organization. She made two blankets. I think I might have helped a little, and that got us two free tickets to Disney, so we had to buy a ticket for Josh. He was three and a half years old at the time, and our oldest daughter, she wasn't yet a year old, so she was free. So we flew down to Florida. We rented a minivan, we stayed with Grandma a few days, and then kind of in the middle of our stay, we drove to Orlando, we went to Magic Kingdom, and we stayed overnight, and then we drove back to Grandma's before we flew home. So that was kind of the plan. Now, while we're at Disney, we signed up to go hear a pitch on the Disney Vacation Club. Again, that's Disney's timeshare, and just for attending the pitch, this is why we went. We weren't actually ever considering buying one. But the reason we're going to attend to pitch is because you received Disney like store credit to be used at the gift shop. And if you've ever been down there, everything the gift shop is pretty expensive. And my wife, Taryn, she's always been great about finding deals and saving money, and it seemed like a good idea. Time to Kill. We get, you know, free money. It seemed worth our time right to be able to get some souvenirs and and heck, you know, we were like, more not gonna buy anything. They're not gonna be able to sell us. So we go the pitch. Let me just say this, and I've since learned this more, they have this process nailed down. And most good salespeople do. They're trained, they're experts on human behavior, and we walked right into the trap. We will come for the streets. We will come for this free stuff you can't sell us. We are smarter than you. That was our mentality going into this. So here we are having a wonderful, magical time in Disney, and they pitch us on the Disney Vacation Club, and I remember like the greeting area, the waiting area, the meeting room, we had an appointment. It was all so family friendly. The kids were engaged. It wasn't boring. It was fun. You didn't feel like you were being marched through the slaughterhouse. It didn't feel like that. It felt wonderful. Disney magic, right? They started by asking us about our stay and how much fun we were having. They asked how often we'd like to come back, and how magical this had all been. And honestly, we had been having a great time. It was such a fun trip. Then they started telling us about how we could create a lasting experience for our family, forever, the memories we would make, the family traditions, the savings it would be if we had a plan to come back year after year, how our vacations could grow as our family grew. How year after year our family could experience magic after magic, right? That was the pitch. I remember they left us alone for a few minutes, you know, maybe even longer. And honestly, I think back now they were probably watching and listening to us, because we were talking to each other, right? Taryn and I were having a discussion, and I remember we were talking about how nice this would be if we just knew. Taryn said, like, there's so much work that goes into preparing a vacation, it'd be so much easier if we just knew we had a vacation set every year or every other year, however we wanted to apply the points you got. We did think about the numbers really quickly. And you know, remember, this is about two and a half years before we really set on our journey to figure out how to manage money. Well together, in 2010 I was still under the delusion that my income would just steadily increase year after year, and that MBA I was working on would magically give me huge career opportunities. And that was my mentality. I'll just, we'll just be making so much money. Wouldn't really have to worry about this. Like it feels like a big decision now, but it's probably not going to be when we look back in five years, right? That was the delusion I was living in again, so much so that the cost of the Disney Vacation Club would be like nothing in the near future, right? Are you following me? So let's just do a reality check. Over 50% of our take home pay was our mortgage. We didn't have margin. We felt like we had a few dollars because I over borrowed on student loans, and the money was sitting in our bank account. We couldn't afford Disney park tickets. Taryn had to volunteer to get us in right like, how did we forget all this yet? One day later, after hearing a pitch in their sale of office, we were building an argument for why buying a Disney Disney Vacation Club was a good decision. We were out. Of our minds. So the salesman comes back into the conference room, and we signed up, and we did confirm that we had three days to cancel if we changed our mind. And I remember the salesman saying, Just give him a call if he has any questions. He said he might be hard to reach because he was going on a Disney cruise, because he was going to sell more Disney Vacation clubs there, and reception might be spotty. So we signed, we left. We had cautious excitement, and I remember getting back to the hotel and doing more research. You know, when I think about this, I wonder why we didn't research during the sales meeting. And, you know, thinking back it, we didn't have smartphones yet. We didn't have the internet in our pocket, so we get back to the hotel, pull out a laptop, you know, get on the Wi Fi, and we started researching. We discovered there was whole other you know, secondary markets, rental markets for Disney Vacation clubs, people trying to get out of their their contracts at like, big losses, right? So you could pick one up, a used Disney Vacation Club, right, a second hand one off the secondary market for a steep discount. And I mean steep, I forget it might have been like quarters on the dollar. And there was also a rental market where people who couldn't use their timeshare rented it out for cheap. Okay, so you didn't even have to make the long term commitment. The more we learned, the clearer it became. This was a terrible idea, so we canceled it. I called the salesman. His name was Nick. I didn't actually remember that. It's just because I was looking at my email, and I found the email that I sent him because I left him a voicemail, and then I sent him an email so that I had a written confirmation with a timestamp of when I sent it. Shortly after, he called me back. He was very disappointed. I just remember he like, he couldn't believe it. He said he thought I was a man of my word, and I remember telling him something like, like, I am we just shouldn't have made this decision. And we confirm that we did have three days to cancel because we wanted to think about it. Fortunately. Thank you, Jesus, we canceled. And here's something important. You know, when I, you know, Tara and I were talking the other night, we haven't gone back to Disney, you know. And that's not to say that if we hadn't canceled, you know, if we had gotten the Disney Vacation Club, we wouldn't have gone back. We might have, but we didn't, and we've had a great, rich, full life for the last 16 years, we didn't need Disney to do it. I am so very grateful we didn't get stuck in that trap. Now, here's what we do differently today. We sleep on decisions. I mean, typically, any decision over $300 we typically sleep on unless we've been like researching it and planning for it. We aren't in a rush. We have learned there are never one time only deals like even today is Presidents Day. And you know, I went online and I see all these Presidents Day sales, and I remember we've been talking about maybe replacing refrigerator. And I remember talking with Taryn and being like, Oh, well, black there's Black Friday sales. Maybe we should do a Black Friday. And we didn't. We've been kind of getting by and, you know, oh, they'll probably be sales around Christmas, or New Year's Day or, well, presents that there's always gonna be another sale. There's never one time. Only deals, sales come, sales go, and then they come again, most decisions in life are wants. That's something Tara and I have learned. Most decisions in life are wants. They're not needs. And having the freedom to say no and even a disposition to say no to spending on wants is a good thing. It will save you a ton of money, particularly over the years. So emotion makes terrible decisions. Motion makes terrible financial decisions. Scarcity makes terrible financial decisions. Ego makes terrible financial decisions. There's a lot of bad things that make terrible financial decisions, and it's easy to get sucked into them. And magical future income that, you know, mindset that I had had that makes terrible financial decisions, because you just kick the can down the road. You're like, ah, we'll be able to make more, and we'll take care of it later. And what saved us? It wasn't intelligence, it wasn't discipline, it wasn't a budget. It was a pause, right? I told you this was like three and a half years before we really got after it, working together on our finances. So it wasn't intelligent, wasn't financial. Knowledge. It wasn't discipline, it wasn't a budget, it was a pause three days that pause changed the trajectory of that decision. Sometimes the most powerful financial tool you have is not a spreadsheet. It's time. Sleep on it. Pray on it, talk it through, assume the deal will still be there tomorrow, because it probably will be. And, oh, if it isn't, it probably wasn't meant for you. Anyway, we didn't need Disney to build memories. We needed wisdom, and wisdom is always cheaper than regret. You know, thinking about this story and just to connect it, it actually connects very well to where we are right now in the liturgical calendar we're entering let Today is Monday, Tomorrow's Tuesday, and then we've got Ash Wednesday. And if we think about Lent, you know, Lent has three pillars, prayer, fasting and almsgiving and and what is fasting really? It's practicing saying no. What is ALMS giving? It's choosing generosity over self indulgence and what is prayer. It's slowing down enough to hear the Lord before we act. If Taran and I had been living those three pillars more intentionally back then, maybe we wouldn't have been so easily swept up in emotion and good marketing. Maybe we would have paused sooner, prayed, slept on it, fasted from the impulse, we probably would have asked better questions. Honestly we we probably maybe we wouldn't even have gone to the timeshare meeting. You know the the sales pitch for the Disney Vacation Club, but lent gives us space to build those muscles, right? I've talked before about virtues. My friend Dr Justin Anderson says virtues are muscles of the soul, right, habits of the heart. You need to work at them. You need to build those muscles. Lent is such a good time to do that, because what almost trapped us? It wasn't actually Disney that almost trapped us. It was impulse, it was emotion, and it was assuming future income would solve present foolishness. And Lent is the season where we retrain our hearts. So probably next week, in the weeks to come, I usually try to stick to what's happening in our liturgical season. I plan to talk more about prayer, fasting, almsgiving, and how they apply directly to our financial lives. But for now, maybe this is your invitation. Where do you need to slow down? Where do you need to fast from impulse? Where do you need to pray before you purchase the freedom we feel today? Taryn and I, being mortgage free, living with margin. It didn't happen because we said yes to everything. It happened because we learned to say no. And sometimes the most spiritual word you can say with money is no, right? I have a good friend, brother Adam Neary, his two favorite words are yes, Jesus, that's beautiful. And I think with money, the best control we can have with money is when we learn to say no, right? We say no to our self and our our our wants, our wants and desires. We say no to them, but to Jesus, we say, yes, yes, Jesus. So there you have. It. A crazy story. My attempt to tie it into Lent, as we approach Lent, and I will, I plan to talk about prayer, fasting and almsgiving and how it relates to our financial life. Those are great Len is a great time to practice using our muscles so many different virtues, so that we can we can have a better life, to bless the people around us and to serve the Lord. That's why we're here. Why did God make us to know Him, love Him, and serve Him in this life, so we could be happy with him forever the next Wow, Len is such a great opportunity to practice all of that. So I hope this was helpful. Thank you for joining me today. God bless you. Thank you for listening to Catholic money talk. I hope you join us again next time, please click Subscribe on your podcast app to get notified of new episodes. God bless you and have a great day. Foreign.