Russell Gave Our Retirement Plans Back to Us

My husband and I had spent twenty years building toward a retirement that would allow us to travel on our own terms. The timeshare we purchased in 2006 had felt like a piece of that plan at the time. A guaranteed week at a beautiful resort. A foundation for annual family vacations. But plans change. Our children scattered across the country. Our travel preferences evolved. And the maintenance fees, which had been manageable in 2006, had grown to nearly $5,000 annually - a significant line item on a retirement budget that was supposed to go toward the flexible travel we had always imagined. We decided to sell and use the proceeds plus the freed-up annual fees to fund the kind of travel we actually wanted. The problem was that our previous attempts to sell had produced nothing. Resort resale program waitlist. Independent listing platforms that attracted no serious interest. A broker who took a marketing fee and delivered no buyers. I found Russell Smith at JP Mutual Management through a retirement planning forum where someone had described their experience selling a timeshare and recapturing the annual fees as travel funds. Several people in the thread mentioned Russell specifically. From my first call with Russell, I felt I was dealing with someone who genuinely understood the resale market for our type of property. He explained the specific buyer community for our resort, how he reached them, and what about our ownership would be particularly attractive to serious purchasers. His knowledge was specific and clearly earned from experience. The $48,200 our sale achieved was more than I had hoped for. It funded a travel account that my husband and I have already begun using for exactly the trips we had always imagined taking. The irony is that the money from selling the timeshare is making possible the kind of travel the timeshare was supposed to provide. Russell Smith gave us our retirement plans back. That is a gift with no adequate price tag.