The Horror! The Horror! (Wall Street Bonus Cut Edition)

Bloomberg has a long, and only slightly snide take on the $200K is not wealthy trope making the rounds.  The focus of this piece is, however, those unfortunates in the Financial Sector who have had their bonuses cut, and are consequently up shit creek. 

 Its absolutely heart-wrenching - take the case of Schiff, a marketing director

His family rents the lower duplex of a brownstone in Cobble Hill, where his two children share a room. His 10-year- old daughter is a student at $32,000-a-year Poly Prep Country Day School in Brooklyn. His son, 7, will apply in a few years.

He wants ... “a room for each kid, three bedrooms, maybe four,” he said. “Imagine four bedrooms. You have the luxury of a guest room, how crazy is that?”

The family rents a three-bedroom summer house in Connecticut and will go there again this year for one month instead of four. Schiff said he brings home less than $200,000 after taxes, health-insurance and 401(k) contributions.

“I wouldn’t want to whine,” Schiff said. “All I want is the stuff that I always thought, growing up, that successful parents had.”

Not everyone is in such trouble though, thanks to their prudence in saving.  Consider Scheiner, a head-fund manager who

... spends about $500 a month to park one of his two Audis in a garage and at least $7,500 a year each for memberships at the Trump National Golf Club in Westchester and a gun club in upstate New York. A labradoodle named Zelda and a rescued bichon frise, Duke, cost $17,000 a year, including food, health care, boarding and a daily dog-walker who charges $17 each per outing, he said.

Still, he sold two motorcycles he didn’t use and called his Porsche 911 Carrera 4S Cabriolet “the Volkswagen of supercars.”

There is a lot more in this vein - go check it out...