Dream Home Maintenance Burden

A story about how a wealthy homeowner realized their dream home became more of a burden than a joy.

"Someone who was at the camp with us, they have probably like a 15-20 million dollar home. They called me yesterday and were talking about house hunting. I was confused because they just bought their dream home last year - they told me 'we went crazy on this house because it's our dream home, it's what we've been working for all these years.'

But then they explained: 'Our HVAC broke, that's 50 grand to fix. The guy fixing our AC has engineering degrees. I pay $2,000 a month to our pool guy, another $4,000 for landscaping. It's just annoying - everything is my problem. Yeah, it's great when we entertain people, but most of the time I'm just sitting in one chair, and I have 10,000 extra square feet of empty house.'

It was a visceral reminder that first you own your things, and then they own you. He had this reaction where he's like 'I gotta change this because this is not my dream actually. I thought this was my dream, but it's not because I don't want to be owned by this.' His monthly expenses are so high, he has to stress about when things break. He feels wasteful spending so much just fixing the pool when he used to live all year off that money, and now it's just going to one little thing."