Struggling on $500,000 a year, Bloomberg style

It's a standard story. Banker who enjoyed six-figure salaries and hefty bonuses all through the good years loses his job and is suddenly out on the street. What to do next? Bloomberg Magazine offers this sympathetic profile of David Roberts, an out-of-work economist.

"Roberts never earned millions from Wall Street. In his best years, he made $500,000, which provided scant cushion against prolonged unemployment or career upheaval. His salary is more representative than those of the chief executive officers and hedge fund managers who have been pilloried in congressional hearings."

So Bloomberg thinks that $500,000 a year provides "scant cushion" against unemployment. Do they point out that this is ten times the median household wage of the United States? Or that this would put Roberts very comfortably in the top 0.5% of US earners? No.

It's hard to have much sympathy for somebody that has worked for decades on Wall St that has spent and invested their very large salary so irresponsibly that they have no buffer against a couple of years of unemployment. Of course this is the story that Bloomberg is missing. All of these people thought the good years would never end, and structured their entire financial lives around that fiction. Hence the sudden difficulty paying off ridiculously large mortgages, etc, when the music stopped.