Ben Stein’s column It Ain’t Easy Being Rich in Conde Nast’s Portofolio magazine attempts to enlighten the have-lesses of the drudgery of wealth. The sometimes-actor and always-economist spends the bulk of his time bemoaning the tedium and overhead associated with managing the assets one has earned, inherited or married into.

Stein correctly points out the expectations, obligations and burdens of multiple home ownership:

If you are a normal rich person like the ones I know, you cannot have only one home. You have to have many homes. A typical well-heeled man or woman will have a home in a large city like New York, a home in a skiing area like Vail, a home in a warm winter resort like Palm Springs, Indian Wells, or Palm Beach, and a pied-à-terre in a foreign capital….

Every one of these houses has taxes that need to be paid, plumbing that needs to be fixed, walls that need to be repainted, air-conditioning that needs fixing if it breaks when the weather is truly sweltering, DSL service that needs reconnection if it stops working when the stock market is down 200 points in one morning, and—bien sûr—swimming pool pumps and filters that require posthaste fixing if they break at 2 a.m. and make a sound like a fire engine all night long.

Each dwelling or retreat needs a manager who keeps tabs on the property and reports back to the mother ship. Last spring, the majordomo of my haunt in the desert reported to me that a pipe had burst under the floor of my pad there and half of the house was flooded. It is at those moments that you wonder why you bothered working like a madman all of those years: to buy a home on a golf course with plumbing that would make you insane? Was that it?

Clearly no one has clued Gentle Ben in on the structural advantages of fractional ownership. Depending on which plan you select, you can have all those homes with none of that hassle. None of it. No taxes, insurance, plumbers, DSL bills, faulty pool filters. Sure there are managers on-site, but they’re full-time professionals, more akin to a five-star concierge than a retired handyman with a pickup truck and a buddy who’ll fix that toilet “real soon.”

Better than that, you’ll pay only a fraction of the market value of each home and often gain hard-to-obtain access to luxury resort amenities: private beaches, reserved tee times, personal chefs and more.

What do you give up? Full-time year-round access to all those residences. If that’s what you need, you should buy the homes outright like Ben does. But if you only need each home for a handful of weeks or months annually, then that’s what you should buy.

With Private Residence Clubs (e.g., Four Seasons, Ritz Carlton) you pick a specific home and buy it for a portion of the year. Many owners actually buy multiple fractions in different homes, creating their own personalized worldwide network of homes. With Destination Clubs like Exclusive Resorts, you’re enrolled in someone else’s network of luxury homes. Club members purchase a fixed annual number of days in these homes, with some advance notice required to book specific properties.

Both models shield you from the sort of hassle and headache that Stein vividly describes. To get the full rundown, take a look at the free Decision Guides for both types of clubs.