Mr. & Mrs. Peacock Downsize

There have been very few times - perhaps none at all - when the thought has crossed my mind "Darn, I wish I'd been in Florida for that."

But, darn, I sure do wish I'd been in Vero Beach for the dream home (and contents) auction of the charmingly and aptly named Richard and Amanda Peacock.

Instead, I had to read about the Peacock's "lifestyle liquidation" in yesterday's Wall Street Journal.

First off, their ocean front digs were 10,000 square feet chock full of stuff. Stuff like:

...leopard-skin chairs, pinball machines, antique Coca-Cola signs and six sports cars. It had a room full of 100 hunting trophies -- including a hyena and the head of an elephant -- and an aviary out back housing eight rare parrots...

The couple designed much of the furniture themselves, including the gold and leopard-skin dining-room chairs.

"Richard likes leopard skin, and I like gold, so it was the perfect match," says Mrs. Peacock.

(Something tells me that these folks weren't at the rare and precious intersection of money and good taste.)

Mr. Peacock's fortune came through real estate, so he's fallen on hard times. That and a recent bout with cancer prompted the couple to downsize. (Peacock maintains that it's the latter rather than the former that's really behind the sale.)

"We don't need all this stuff anymore," he says, adding that the couple plans to buy a cabin in the Blue Mountains. "It's time to simplify."

We don't need all this stuff anymore?

Did they actually have a need at one time for a life-sized statue of Bart Starr, a life-sized statue of Muhammed Ali, and a $6ooK motor coach home? An in-house barber shop, an aviary, a waterfall, a tiki bar? Not to mention all those hunting trophies - wildebeest, baboon - that came from somewhere, but not from the blunderbuss of Jungle Richard Peacock, who doesn't hunt.

Alas, the low-end merchandise went - a Pennzoil sign for $75, a wildebeest hunting trophy for $250 - but the high end stuff was underbid.

The offer for the motor home was under the water of the $200K owed on it.

The Peacock's wanted to jettison their Ferrari - which only has 5,000 miles on it - but not for the chump-change offer of $110,000.

There are a number of auction outfits specializing in these types of rich-folk sales, which one auctioneer characterized as  "going minimalist." (Somehow, I suspect that the householder with the 70 motorcycles that Accelerated Marketing Group helped unburden has a different definition of 'going minimalist' than I do. I suspect that those with gold and leopard skin packed mansions would consider the way most of us common folks live the equivalent of the sack-cloth life of a 9th century Irish monk in a stone hut in the Blasket Islands.)

Jim Gall - coiner of the 'going minimalist' phrase - runs Auction Company of America.

"It's the financing and debt that pushes these people to the wall. But they're also saying that they've had it with buying and collecting. It's like a great purging."

(Binge. Purge. Talk about an unhealthy lifestyle.)

For the Peacocks, that financing and debt ain't nothing. They owe $2.2 on the main mansion, another $1M on the four-bedroom casita they camped out in while the real deal was being built. The Big House costs $100K a year for maintenance, alone. (That's indoor and outdoor, which must include dusting Bart Starr and the fanged baboon head in the guest bedroom.)

Anyway, the Peacocks' decision to end their oh-so-peacockian lifestyle came a scant four months after they moved into their dream house. Unable to easily unload the house once they put it on the market this winter, they decided to go for broke (metaphorically speaking), and brought in Kruse International to sell both houses and their no longer needed "stuff."

Alas, they were only able to unload about 500 pieces of "stuff", bringing in a paltry $300K - further paltricized once they forked over $200K for Kruse and other sale expenses.

Bidding on the main house was too low, so the Peacocks stopped the sale. And since they didn't want to rattle around their stuff-unstuffed house, they also withdrew the objets that hadn't moved. (There's need and then there's need.)

"Nobody's spending money right now," said Mr. Peacock, sitting under the tent with his head buried in his hands. "I guess we'll try to just keep hanging on."

Well, Mr. Peacock, you may be right that nobody's spending money, although I will tell you that I have a use-it-or-lose-it $10 coupon for LL Bean that's burning a hole in my pocket. But the real problem may well be that the era during which some people with way too much money went into a frenzy kitting out their mega-homes with life sized statues of Bart Starr is over.

We're all going minimalist now. Sounds like a good idea to me.