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In both Real Life and fiction, it can often cost a small fortune just to barely maintain a high-value property, whether a small business, Big Fancy House, an exotic or custom vehicle, or an elegant estate with acres of gardens, farmland or pristine wilderness. For those with Impossibly Cool Wealth, this is not an issue. For this character, however, his lifestyle suggests that he is barely able to afford to keep the property. The property takes up a large portion of the character's time and money, and he is generally forced to live a very modest lifestyle otherwise.
Compare Down On The Farm. Contrast Impossibly Cool Wealth.
There are several different types, each one tending to be most associated with a geographic area:
- European (Impoverished Patrician): the character feels that they have an obligation to all of their ancestors and decendants to keep the family estates in order, but no longer has the actual money-generating capacity to keep it going. Their efforts to earn enough to keep the property pristine while paying the property taxes make excellent plot fodder, whether Played For Drama or Played For Laughs.
- American: land could be purchased very cheaply as recently as within living memory, and land far away from big cities still can be purchased for far less than other parts of the world. As a result, lots of people gained land without having money to buy fancy manufactured goods. As time went on, even though theoretically they had more wealth, farmers tended to became more economically pinched compared to city dwellers, since their income depended on keeping their wealth tied up maintaining the farmland. In fiction, the character is often portrayed as an uncultured counterpart to the Impoverished Patrician, keeping traditions alive and not selling out to the villainous developer, who is hoping Land Poor characters will default on their mortgages.
- Japanese: In modern Japan, because land is astronomically expensive, few people own substantial real estate, and many who do received the property through inheritance, and would not be able to afford to buy it now. Unlike western media, in Anime, being Land Poor is less often a critical plot element, but rather used to give a character a place to be alone, find a long-lost Mac Guffin or Artifact Of Doom, etc., without being unreasonably wealthy.
European Style
- The other wiki's stately home
 article touches on the subject of the trope.
- "The costs of running a stately home are legendarily high. Many owners rent out their homes for use as film and television sets as a means of extra income, thus many of them are familiar sights to people who have never visited them in person. The grounds often contain other tourist attractions, such as safari parks, funfairs or museums."
- Part of the plot of the movie The Grass Is Greener (1960) with Robert Mitchum and Cary Grant. Part of the synopsis:
- "Victor and Hillary are down on their luck to the point that they allow tourists to take guided tours of their castle."
- The Life And Times Of Scrooge Mc Duck deals with the McDuck family becoming too poor to maintain Castle McDuck at one point, although their ancestors were originally driven away by a supposedly ghostly hound.
- Lady Saint Edmund from Candleshoe.
- A significant portion of the series Monarch of the Glen dealt with the financial difficulties of the aptly - named Glenbogle estate.
- Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With The Wind is an American example of a European-style Impoverished Patrician.
American Style
- Kathleen Kelly in You've Got Mail owns a small business forced to compete with a chain store. She ends up working for the chain.
- In The Money Pit, the protagonists buy a Big Fancy House for a huge discount - and the repairs become a HerculeanTask.
- In the war movie / comedy Father Goose, Cary Grant is tricked by the British government into being stranded on a desert island - along with the wreckage of his yacht, which he tries to repair throughout the film.
- Helen Hayes plays this role in Herbie Rides Again.
- In Spaced Invaders, the trope is played so straight it's funny.
- In Mildred D. Taylor's YA novel Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry and its sequels, which are set in Mississippi during the Depression, the fact that the black Logan family owns its own land gives them relative freedom and dignity compared to the other black families in the area, who are all sharecroppers and thus totally beholden to the people whose land they live on and farm. (Truth In Television for the era, obviously — after Reconstruction, the sharecropping/tenant farming system that set it was in some ways practically indistinguishable from slavery.)
- To the Manor Born is a Brit Com about the relationship between a downwardly mobile noblewoman and the nouveau-riche businessman who bought her family estate.
Japanese style
- Kagome's family in Inu Yasha is obviously not unusually wealthy, but they own a house with sheds, a shrine, a well, and a huge tree in the backyard - in downtown Tokyo.
- In Tenchi Muyo, Tenchi's family owns property that apparently includes a shrine, carrot farm, lake, large wilderness areas, and a Big Fancy House. His father is a professor of architecture, and his Unwanted Harem includes a Super Villain, two princesses, the grandaughter of the chief of the galaxy police, and a super-scientist. Dispite this, his family can barely afford to send him to college, and his Unwanted Harem can barely afford to eat even working multiple jobs.
- The Tendos in Ranma One Half also held a relatively large home in Tokyo, despite having very little means of support (shown that they rent out the dojo and are called to deal with things like supernatural creatures). Depending on fanon, the money comes from (eternally off-screen) students of the dojo, or Nabiki funds it with her money-making schemes. Or in other cases, some... other ways of income.
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