But economy isn't always part of the equation. Some advisors say they have clients who spent as much on a bar mitzvah or a wedding as the gross domestic product of a small nation. Others want second childhoods and decide, at the age of 55, that it's time to go out and buy a motorcycle. One man bought a house that he hasn't even visited, let alone seen, because it was on a really nice golf course, and he gets on his private jet to fly out there four or five times a year just to play golf. Another spent half a million dollars on a bar mitzvah at the Waldorf-Astoria.

Bruce Fenton, founder of Atlantic Financial in Norwell, Mass., says there are people who have hired Britney Spears or the Rolling Stones to come to their private parties.

"I've seen people spend a million dollars on a wedding," Fenton says. "But that doesn't seem as lavish as spending that on a 16-year-old's birthday. A 16-year-old doesn't have a clue as to how much money that really is."

Harley Lance Kaplan, a certified financial planner in Sherborn, Mass., says he just helped a client buy an island in Maine. "I said to him, 'You don't like cold weather.' He said, 'Well, just in case.'"

In fact, Kaplan says he sees a lot of wealthy people purchase things for status reasons, even when they don't care for them. He had one client who paid $600,000 for a Roy Lichtenstein painting he didn't even like. Another bought a boat he didn't know how to use. Yet another buys horses even though he is allergic to them. "If you don't like the animal, that's fine. But buying a racehorse when you don't even want anything at all to do with horses?" Kaplan says.

Some clients will buy businesses on a whim, just because they can, and they'll realize you can't operate them as a hobby. Craig Carnick, a financial planner in Colorado Springs, says he had two wealthy clients who bought restaurants that they hoped they could run in their spare time, and in both cases, they wound up selling.

Carnick had another client who was a physician and a wine aficionado, and he wanted to buy a wine store. That turned out to be a mixed blessing, he says. The client went on wine-tasting trips to France and Germany and other parts of Europe, and he became known as something of an expert in the wine community, which he enjoyed. But he also found himself at the center of some heated and messy employee disputes that resulted largely from his being an absentee owner. After six years, he got out of the business. In the end, he broke even, Carnick says.

"I think if he had to do it over again, he probably would have just bought a bigger wine cellar," Carnick says.
Problems arise when clients turn to their advisors to find out how to finance some of these hopes and dreams, and the advisor has to tell the clients they can't really afford them.

"You might think that someone with $30 million or $40 million doesn't really need to do a whole retirement planning exercise-because they've got so much money-but most people tend to live pretty close to what their capabilities are," says Ben Johnson, an advisor with Laird Norton Tyee in Seattle. Johnson says the client may be able to afford something now, but it could put a dent in their retirement plan or their legacy.

Tim Phillips, CEO of Phillips & Company, a Portland, Ore.-based wealth management firm, says a lot of high-net-worth clients these days want to buy private jets, but while those with more than $50 million in assets won't really have a problem, those with, say, $5 million to $10 million are pushing the envelope.