Explore blog articles 26 August 2026 – vivla
Eighty Summers: The Calculation Nobody Does
The calculation almost nobody does before buying a house.
Someone said it over dinner, without giving it any importance, and it stays with you far longer than it should:
"If all goes well, you have about eighty summers left."
Eighty. Not eighty years. Eighty summers.
Eighty times the air changes at the end of June. Eighty times you pack a bag that is far too big. Eighty times someone says "shall we get in?" and you say yes.
And then they run out.
Life expectancy in Spain stands at 84 years. That is the INE figure, and one of the highest in the world: more than ten years of life gained since 1975. Eighty-four summers, then, with luck. Round it down to eighty, because you will not remember the first three or four.
Eighty little squares. They fit on a napkin.
Your eighty summers
Move the age slider and look at how many squares are left on the right. Basis: life expectancy in Spain, 84 years (INE), rounded to 80 memorable summers.
If you are 42, half of it is already spent. Not in a dramatic sense — well spent, most likely — but spent.
That part, more or less, everyone senses. What nobody senses is the second calculation.
Summers are not distributed evenly
In 2015 a writer named Tim Urban published an essay with a very simple idea: instead of measuring your life in years, measure it in times. How many more times you will see the sea. How many more books you will read. How many more dinners you will have with your mother.
He ran the numbers on his parents. He lived far away, saw them about ten days a year, and they were in their mid-sixties. This is what came out:
The day he left home, at 18
93 %He had already used up 93% of all the in-person time he would ever spend with his parents. Not 50%. 93%. At 18, with his whole life ahead of him and almost all of the time with them already behind.
Now turn it around and put yourself on the other side of the table.
If you have children, 93% of all the time you will spend in the same room as them happens before they turn 18. Time-use data confirms it from another angle: time spent with your children peaks in your thirties and falls from there. It does not taper. It falls.
And there is no argument involved. Nobody leaves angry. One year there is university, then a year abroad, then a flatshare, then a job in another city, then a partner with another family and other plans for August.
Eighteen summers, twelve good ones, six months
This is where the maths gets genuinely uncomfortable. And it is worth saying plainly: this is a napkin, not a study.
You have 18 summers with a child under your roof. Eighteen. That is not an estimate, it is arithmetic.
Of those 18, they will not remember the first three. The last three already belong to them: friends, festivals, a first summer job, a boyfriend or girlfriend. That leaves twelve. Twelve summers in which you are, literally, their entire world.
Now look at your actual calendar. In Spain the legal minimum is 30 calendar days of holiday a year. Of those, with luck, half fall in summer and fall at the same time as theirs. Fifteen days. Being generous.
That is all the summer you will ever share with your child. Added up. In full. And that half-year either holds — or fails to hold — everything they will describe thirty years from now when someone asks them where they come from.
The wrong question
At VIVLA there are a lot of conversations about houses. They start with price, location, returns. Sensible things. But at some point, in almost all of them, the subject shifts without anyone announcing it. And it stops being about the house.
The second-home industry has spent decades answering the wrong question. The question the buyer is asked is "how much house can you afford?". The question they are asking themselves, even if never in those words, is "how many summers do I have left and what do I do with them?".
They are not the same question. And the first one leads to some fairly bad decisions.
Because a whole house does not give you more summer. It gives you twelve months of responsibility in order to use four weeks. The boiler goes, the pool, the residents' association, the insurance, the person who opens up in May, the pine tree that came down, the phone call in September. Plus a very specific kind of guilt: the house is empty. You have to go. Even though this year you fancied Greece.
Nobody buys a house in order to acquire an obligation in August.
But it is what an enormous number of people end up with. And there is something more uncomfortable still: however big the house, you can only be in one place at a time and you only have 30 days. By the pure arithmetic of your own calendar, a whole house sits empty more than 90% of the year. That is not the owner failing. It is the model.
You are paying 100% of something your life can only use 8% of.
What the research says
Two things are worth having on the table before making a decision like this.
Experiences over things
57% of people said their experiential purchase had made them happier, against 34% who chose the material one. The reason is not sentimental, it is mechanical: you get used to things, you do not get used to memories. And there is a bonus almost nobody counts: anticipation. Waiting for an experience brings more joy than waiting for an object, so May and June count too. They are also summer.
Van Boven & Gilovich, Cornell · Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2003Years following the same families
The longest longitudinal study of human life that exists. After almost nine decades, the conclusion is so simple it is almost offensive: what predicts whether you will be healthy and happy at 80 is not money, or status, or cholesterol. It is the quality of your relationships at 50.
Harvard Study of Adult Development, running since 1938Translated: the hours you put into the people you love now are the only investment with that return.
An eighth is more time than you have
What you buy at VIVLA is a fraction of a house. An eighth, a quarter, a half. With a deed, a notary and your name on the register.
And the objection that always comes up, on the first call, is the same one: "yes, but it isn't entirely mine". That is understandable. But it is worth running the numbers one last time.
An eighth of a house is more time than you have.
Buying the whole house would not have given you a single extra day of summer with your children. It would have given you eight times the bill and twelve months of management for exactly the same days on the beach.
You are not buying less house. You are buying only the part your life is capable of using. And the rest — the money that did not go on a boiler breaking down in February, when you are not there — stays where it should: in another summer, somewhere else, in bringing the grandparents, in having room for the cousins.
The twelfth summer
None of this is written to rush anyone. Urgency is a poor adviser and a worse salesman, and a decision like this should not be made with a knot in your stomach.
It is written because the calculation changes something.
Eighty summers is not many. But it is eighty. It is a real number, it is yours, and most people have never looked at it. Looking at it is not depressing: it is the one thing that turns an ordinary summer into a decision, instead of something that simply happens.
This August someone in your house is going to say "shall we get in?".
It is one of the ones you have left.
Say yes.
The calculations in this article are illustrative estimates built on the assumptions stated in the text (life expectancy in Spain according to INE, the legal minimum of 30 calendar days of annual holiday under the Spanish Workers' Statute, and an average split of days across seasons). They are not personal projections and not advice of any kind. The weeks of use attached to each share are governed by the contractual documentation of each home.
vivla co-ownership
Real ownership, a fraction of the cost
VIVLA offers managed co-ownership of luxury second homes across Spain — Mallorca, Ibiza, Menorca, Baqueira and many more. You own a registered share with a real title deed, not a use right, and VIVLA handles the purchase, the legal structure and year-round maintenance. It's the rational choice when you'll use the house a few weeks a year rather than the whole season.
