Are you a 'fractional lifer'?

Never before have such a broad range of goods and services been so readily available to such a proportion of the population. Welcome to the internet age: Music, movies, groceries, consumables and information are never more than a few mouse-clicks away. In fact, now you don’t even need to be within clicking distance of a computer to access the internet- just reach into your jacket pocket and the once humble mobile phone puts pretty much everything your heart ever desired at your thumb tips.

The contagion effect of this set-up is that the busy professional grows to expect that the wider elements of their lives are accessible with such broadband swift ease. As such we are seeing a move away from the more traditional methods of obtaining the accepted societal demonstrations of wealth. Today’s cash rich time poor individuals are generally a touch more sagacious when it comes to managing their conspicuous consumption- balancing their spending between experiential reward and financial outlay. They require all the accoutrements of a traditional luxury lifestyle without the chore and expense that full ownership entails, this has created a consumer breed referred to by trendwatching gurus as transumers or fractional lifers, this group values not the actual ownership of goods and instead focus is on the experiences those goods can provide.

These fractional lifers desire designer accessories, exotic cars, membership of the best golf courses and holiday homes as well as the über-luxury goods previously only available to the ultra-rich, including yachts, private aviation and dabbling in pastimes such as racehorse ownership but they wish to dip in and out of the experience rather than commit themselves to full ownership.

Such a shift has led to the rapid rise in the popularity of fractional ownership- the concept of dividing an expensive asset into percentage shares and selling those shares to individual owners. Each person who owns a fractional share then gets a relative percentage use of the asset with a management company handling the asset and fractional owners pay fixed fees for this management in addition to variable fees for use.

Although broader acceptance of fractional ownership is only just filtering into the daily life of many consumers already for some fractional lifers fractional ownership is, as the appellation suggests, a way of life.

Over the next few years the fractional market is set to explode, the traditional areas such as cars, yachts and aviation will prosper and globally recognised market leaders established and even those not looking to invest £thousands will be able to participate in the revolution thanks to comparatively lower-priced goods such as handbags, watches and jewellery. Goods and services not even considered previously will come out of leftfield and offer quirky and exciting opportunities- already we have seen part ownership of your own Swiss cow for cheese-making purposes so the innovators are already grasping the fractional thistle.

It seems that a fractional life is the future- previously it was said that life was all about living; today life is all about living for now.

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