A house in White Rock recently went up for sale for a mere $18 million.

The listing for the 14,500-square-foot home is the priciest in White Rock’s history.

The six-bedroom house boasts eight bathrooms, an indoor pool, gym, massage room, spa, theatre, and stage. This oceanfront monstrosity sits on an acre and a half, and even has an elevator.

If that’s not lavish enough for your taste, check out the $100-million Lake Tahoe, Nevada mansion that boasts a movie theatre (of course), a 3,500-bottle wine cellar and indoor swimming pool. Oh, and the 210 acres it sits on.

Still not luxurious enough for you?

What about the $220-million penthouse at One Hyde Park in London? Every window in this six-bedroom, two-story penthouse has bulletproof glass.

Then there’s Antilla, the $1 billion super-home in Mumbai, India. This 27-floor tower is a single home built by Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani. It takes about 600 people to keep the “house” running on a day-to-day basis. One of those daily tasks is “preserving” Ambani’s antique sewing machine collection.

The 400,000-square-foot home sweet home has a garage that fits 168 cars and three helipads, just in case visitors don’t deign to drive.

Back on this side of the ocean, the 29-bedroom beachfront compound in Sagaponack, New York is valued at $6.5 billion. The property alone — “house” not included — is worth about $248 million. This place is so huge it has its own power supply on site.

It’s fun to look at the utterly ridiculous lifestyles of the super rich, but really, that’s about it. I can’t imagine how many people you would need to actually make a monstrous house like the ones described here feel remotely like a home.

It’s hard to believe that some people really do have that much money, and it’s so much money they don’t appear to know what to do with it so they build the gaudiest, most ridiculous monstrosities imaginable.

In the U.S., the financial crisis of 2008 hit countless families right where it hurts: in their lavish lifestyle.

One such family’s struggles during that time and their attempt at recovery is chronicled in the 2012 documentary The Queen of Versailles.

The filmmakers originally intended to follow the Siegel family’s building of the largest home in America, but as the financial crisis worsened, construction on their 90,000-square-foot homage to the French palace of Versailles slowed and eventually stopped. At 67,000-square-feet, the house was in foreclosure.

However, there’s a happy ending for this family of 10: it was announced earlier this year that construction was resuming on the mansion, and is estimated to be completed by 2015.

Of course, each family member doesn’t require 9,000 square feet of living space. Need isn’t exactly the point in these cases of what I can only describe as extreme housing.

The U.S. housing market crash left countless residences in foreclosure, crumbling and overgrown as a monument to the impermanence of even the most monolithic structures. It’s a reminder that a life full of excess for the sake of it isn’t maintainable, no matter how much fun it might be.