The Two Kinds of Calculation
Maybe, with apologies to Whitman, you, too contain multitudes
There’s a number most second home owners know pretty well.
Property taxes. Insurance. The seasonal opening and closing, which costs more than it should and takes more coordination than it used to. Heat through the winter, or the cost of winterizing if you don’t. The dock in and out. The lawn care. The property manager you found after the pipe froze that one January when nobody was around to catch it.
Add it up. Most people have done this. The number is real and they know it.
Here’s the calculation most people haven’t sat with as carefully: how many weeks were you actually there last year? And what might that mean for who you’re becoming?
Not the weeks you said in March you would be spending there this summer. Not the long weekend in May you had to cancel, or the Columbus Day stretch that got compressed into two nights because something came up. The weeks you were actually there, feet on the trail, boat ready at the dock, coffee going, nowhere else to be.
For most people in this category, that number is somewhere between three and four weeks. Often less. Occasionally more, but not by much.
That’s the financial math. Twelve months of carrying costs divided by three to four weeks of actual use. Most people, when they do it honestly, are a little surprised. Not by the costs themselves. By the ratio.
But that’s not the calculation I’ve been thinking about.
This past winter I talked to more second home owners than usual who were quietly turning something over. Not panicking. Not grieving. Just... thinking out loud. A handful of them said some version of the same thing: this might be the year.
What strikes me now, as I continue to stay in conversation with some of them, is that none of them have made it up yet this season.
I’m not saying they aren’t coming. But it was 77 degrees on the Big Lake yesterday. Gorgeous. The kind of day that in a normal year has the docks full and the boat launches backed up. Traffic was thin.
I noticed it. I’m not drawing conclusions. I’m just saying I noticed it.
The second kind of calculation is harder to do, and it doesn’t have a clean number at the end.
It sounds like this: What does it mean to us to be ‘lake people?’
Because that’s what a second home is, after a certain point. It’s not just a property. It’s an identity. We go up every summer. We’re lake people. The kids grew up in that cove. It becomes part of how you introduce yourself at dinner parties, part of the story you tell about your family, part of what you picture when you imagine a good life.
And that’s not nothing. That identity is real and it was earned. The summers that built it were real. And it never goes away, it will always be part of the largeness that is your story.
The harder question — the one that’s quieter and more private than any conversation about carrying costs — is whether that identity is still the most authentic expression of you. Whether the person who fell in love with this place, who needed what it offered, who was genuinely happiest on that dock on a Tuesday morning in June... whether that’s still the truest expression of you.
Or whether you’ve become someone else a little. Someone who loves October in Madrid and has been talking about a winter in New Mexico for three years now. Someone whose kids are grown and making their own summer stories somewhere else. Someone who still loves the idea of the lake house more reliably than they love the lake house.
There’s no shame in that. People change. That’s the whole point of a life.
You can be lake people for twenty years and then become something else entirely. Island people. Mountain people. People who finally take the trip they’ve been deferring since the kids were small because there was always the house to open, the dock to put in, the summer to organize around this special place.
The math I’m describing isn’t about whether you can afford to keep it. It’s about whether keeping it is still the best expression of the life you’re actively building right now.
That’s the calculation most people haven’t done out loud yet.
They’ve done the financial math. They know the number. They’ve probably justified it a dozen different ways, and some of those justifications are valid. The place matters. The memories are real. The potential is always there.
But the life math is different. And it’s usually the one that tips the scale.
In my experience, the people who are genuinely at peace with their second home — who aren’t lying awake doing quiet arithmetic — have done both. They know what it costs and they know what it gives them, and the trade still makes sense. Not on paper. In their actual life.
The people who are quietly turning something over usually know which calculation they haven’t finished yet.
If you’re in that place — not decided, not ready, just turning it over — I’m not here to tell you what the answer is. I don’t know your summers. I don’t know what the lake means to your family or what else is calling.
But if it would help to think it through with someone who knows this market, knows what buyers in your category are actually looking for, and won’t push you toward any particular outcome: that conversation is easy to start. It doesn’t commit you to anything.
Sometimes it just helps to say the thing out loud to someone who isn’t in your family.
Here’s to knowing what your life is actually asking for.
🧭 Jenn
Keys to the Lakes
