what happens to your estate if you die with a timeshare? does it just have to stay in probate forever while they take out a management fee every month?
In the UK you can't pick and choose from a will, so if you refuse the timeshare you have to refuse the whole inheritance. The exception is if you set it up in advance where the timeshare is willed separately as a nominated "benefit", in which case the "beneficiary" (who has to be someone outside the rest of the will) is able to refuse it.
Read yesterday that one strategy for getting rid of a timeshare is to make sure it’s in the name of the old person who owns it. After they die the probate administrator sends a letter to the timeshare company, ‘no one wanted to take over this contractual obligation, so we’re returning it to you.’
I doubt they could do that, take a management fee from the estate forever until the timeshare is somehow passed on.
More likely there is a huge exit fee (that the "owner" could pay at any time to "give" the timeshare back to the operator) which would be extracted from the estate.
Yeah I can add 1 real anecdote - my lawyer for my family member’s estate suggested completely ignoring the timeshare and just letting that past of the estate go.
I have no idea what happens with the actual physical location but at least from the beneficiary’s perspective it seemed fine to just ignore it.
There is no physical property linked to a timeshare. It's a /share/ in physical property. Nothing is going derelict, because the management company will probably just "mint" another share to sell to a new victim.
This is exactly what my lawyer told me when I "inherited" a timeshare. I never signed a contract and that I should just stop paying. We tried to sell the timeshare first, but that was as much of a scam as buying one. I read somewhere a joke that it's the same scummy people selling you the timeshares during the day and moonlighting as agents to help people get rid of timeshares at night.
