Want a free yacht? I know where you can get one. Seriously.

Sailboats that once sold for six figures now bob abandoned along the Intracoastal Waterway like sun-cracked mooring buoys. Hulking gobs of fiberglass, epoxy and disposable income decay by the hundreds beside affluent coastal communities because the boats’ insatiable maintenance proved too much for even their high-income owners during a recession.

Turns out, being rich is expensive.

Few consider that, though, when Extreme Makeover: Home Edition cordons off yet another working-class neighborhood. Almost as if the building bubble hadn’t exploded and soaked the economy with trillions in toxic assets, the show offers a hard luck family the perfect solution to their financial problems: A bigger house.

The trouble is, much like a yacht, maintaining a luxury home like the one just built for a charming Houston family (Eric and Elaine Johnson and their five daughters) can easily gobble up $22,000 per year. To its credit, the show’s production company has raised additional money for the Johnsons, secured three years of free power from Spark Energy and made the house so efficient a project spokeswoman said it should cost less to cool than the two-bedroom it replaced.

None the less, anyone who’s considered buying a 4,500-square-foot home might want to keep in mind the bills that come with it, even when the mortgage is paid off.

 Taxes: $9,200

Looking at the tax assessments of a few comparable structures, $135 per square foot is a conservative estimate of the value Harris County appraisers place on new, luxury homes. (Land is assessed separately, so the neighborhood shouldn’t affect this number.)

At 4,500 square feet, that works out to $607,500. Add the land at $15,000 for an appraised value of $622,500.

Including exemptions, the Houston home makeover family was billed for property taxes equivalent to 1.48 percent of the appraised value of their old house in 2009. If that rate stays the same, and it might not, their new tax bill for a $622,500 house would be $9,213. That’s in addition to the $832 that county records indicate the household already owes for taxes from 2008 and 2009.

It’s also worth noting that the show uses an outrageous tax loophole that, if challenged by the IRS, potentially could expose home makeover families to tens of thousands of dollars in income taxes on the value of the houses.

 Maintenance: $6,225

Eventually roofs wear out and refrigerators quit. The standard advice to homeowners is to budget one percent of the property’s value for repairs each year, although some advisors recommend budgeting as much as 3.6 percent.

The estimate above uses the lower value, even though a house built by volunteers at breakneck speed is bound to have more issues than one built over the course of several months.

 Insurance: $3,112

While rates vary significantly based on the state, the property, and the owner, online calculators usually estimate homeowners’ insurance costs at .5 percent of the home’s value per year.

 Utilities: $3,540

Eventually, the free electricity will stop. According to a website that markets services to new homeowners, the average Houstonian pays $295 per month on heat, Internet, etc.

Back in days of interest-only mortgages and irrationally appreciating home prices, an entire generation of homeowners managed to forget that houses are, basically, money pits. In a lot of ways, they’re just like boats – constantly battered by the weather, expensive to operate and full of moving parts that inevitably break when you’re least prepared to deal with them.

Plus, the Extreme Makeover houses are often notoriously hard to sell because they’re usually built in modest neighborhoods where rich people simply don’t shop for houses. Even with the properties handed to them mortgage-free, at least five families to date from the series have either entered foreclosure or come close to it.

To be fair, that’s a not huge percentage when you consider the show has built more than 140 houses. But at what point is our country going to get over the ridiculous notion that middle class families ought to spend their money on colossal houses rather than putting their savings into something that won’t lose its roof in a hurricane?

Such is the nature of television that viewers rarely get to see whether, five years later, the featured families have sailed off into the sunset or abandoned their prized gifts on shore because owning them was simply more than they can afford.