Rent your vacation house out and use it too?

I have seen many reasons for investing in rental properties, but one reason that I had never seen anyone mentioning before was the possibility of using that rental property investment as a vacation home. At least not until I was looking at the GMAC Real Estate website at the link above.

It makes perfect sense, however, that you could buy real estate as investment property and then set it up so that it was available for you during certain times of the year. Say you buy property in a hot tourist destination and rent it out by the week. Set aside which weeks you want to be able to use the vacation home, then rent it during the other parts of the year for enough to make the payments on the property plus extra for utilities, insurance, maintenance and any other requirements of renting the property out.