Once your gross income reaches a certain middle-class level, you will no doubt be solicited to attend a timeshare presentation. If you haven't already, you will almost certainly in the future. Sometimes the request takes you by surprise.

My wife and I were staying at an inexpensive hotel near Charleston, South Carolina for a weekend vacation. As we walked down the beautiful Charleston streets, a nice man called out and asked us if we wanted to take a tour of their resort. He said they had just renovated it and he would offer us a $75 gift certificate, plus 2 "ghost tour" tickets if we would take a 90 minute tour of the resort.

"I'm no dummy," I thought. I'd be crazy not to take him up on his offer. It might even be fun to tour the resort for nothing, but if he was going to offer a free night out on the town, then this was an offer too good to refuse. He had us give him $10 to "secure our spot" on the tour.

As we waited, my wife and I enjoyed the outdoor resort complex scenery as we sat on a stone bench next to a beautiful fountain. We both swore we would never actually buy a timeshare here (by now we realized they were probably going to try to sell us something). We knew we couldn't afford it. We just wanted the free gifts. We came back a half hour later, got our $10 back and sat and waited a bit longer.

The personal tour finally started. The rooms were very elegant. This was almost like a museum tour, but we were getting paid! What a deal! Then came the hard-hitting sales pitch. We didn't know what we were in for. About 3 hours later, we were ready to buy. The salesman had convinced us -- it made such great financial sense. Another 2 hours later we had signed all the necessary forms to become owners. They even sent a runner out to get us lunch at Subway (for free) while we waited. What nice people.

Driving home, we were a bit nervous that we had made a big mistake. We were also giddy that we were now owners of such a great timeshare experience. A couple days later, as I do with almost every purchase, I checked online to see if I had gotten the best deal. We had paid about $12,000 for our timeshare deed. (We couldn't afford this, but the salesman told us we could rent it out for enough to cover the payments.)

Well, I found that a similar timeshare unit was selling on eBay for about $2,000. My heart sank into my belly as I realized I had overpaid by about $10,000. I raced through all my contracts. There seemed like hundreds of papers in the stack we came home with.

Finally I found my golden ticket. God was very good to me on that day. I had found the rescission clause which basically said that I was free to cancel the contract anytime within 5 days of the date I had signed it. It was day three. Actually it was day 4 if they counted Sundays. Did they count Sundays? I was in a frenzy. I needed to cancel this thing officially, maybe by tomorrow.

I actually contemplated making an emergency plane flight to the timeshare company's headquarters in Florida to make sure it got cancelled. I got a hold of someone from the company who said I could FedEx it overnight to them.

I got out of my timeshare deed. What a relief. Now it was on to the timeshare resale market to get myself a real deal.