by petesimon
Wall Street Bonus Drop Means Trading Aspen for Discount Cereal
[Via Bloomberg]
Andrew Schiff was sitting in a traffic jam in California this month after giving a speech at an investment conference about gold. He turned off the satellite radio, got out of the car and screamed a profanity.
“I’m not Zen at all, and when I’m freaking out about the situation, where I’m stuck like a rat in a trap on a highway with no way to get out, it’s very hard,” Schiff, director of marketing for broker-dealer Euro Pacific Capital Inc., said in an interview.
Schiff, 46, is facing another kind of jam this year: Paid a lower bonus, he said the $350,000 he earns, enough to put him in the country’s top 1 percent by income, doesn’t cover his family’s private-school tuition, a Kent, Connecticut, summer rental and the upgrade they would like from their 1,200-square- foot Brooklyn duplex. “I feel stuck,” Schiff said. “The New York that I wanted to have is still just beyond my reach.”
[More]
The money quote is the title of this post. See, they only got at most $125,000 for a bonus and they are now crumbling under the economic pressures. Wow!
15% of the people in the US are in poverty and they do not understand stress?
Now I know most wealthy people do not think this way; that the press goes out and finds jerks that are happy to make themselves look like heartless bastards.
Of course, these bastards are really easy to find on Wall Street. It is like this point of view is a factor in their job choice.
What was interesting is the comment from the one guy who stated that Wall Street people do not save. If true that is astounding.
More than anyone they should understand the ups and downs of the system. This lack of saving would also explain their worry.
If they expanded their lifestyle to fit their income but do not have extra to save, then they too are living from month to month, just like a poor person who has no savings.
Of course, the difference is you are an idiot if you make $500,000 a year and do not save for the bad times.
At one time our household made enough to place us in the top 5% of US incomes. We stayed in the same small house and socked away as much as we could. We did eventually move to a larger house but put the money we made from selling the previous house into the new one to keep our equity high.
Over the last 10 years, our income dropped but the money we socked away helped keep us afloat. And even with the housing bubble burst, we still have large amounts of equity in the house we can eventually capture if we need to.
That is how you are supposed to do it. But not, apparently not many working in the financial sectors do it.
Aesop explained it quite well.
Wall Street is full of grasshoppers with nary an ant it appears. Or more likely, the ants are more worried about dealing with things than to give lots of quotes to the press.
