Small Businessman
$100,000

Mark is a 45-year-old who works in the music business and runs a small business from his home. He and his wife are raising their 4-year-old on a little more than $100,000 a year, or about $5,000 a month after taxes. And doing just fine. "Needing $500,000 a year is just silly," he says. "Those assumptions of what it is to be comfortable aren't middle-class assumptions. Middle-class means not having to worry about where your next meal is coming from, that you don't make your living from physical labor, that your education goes beyond high school.

"You only need that kind of money if you want a two-bedroom apartment in Manhattan, a country house, and private school for your kids." Still, he admits upon reflection, his own parents -- his father, who worked in the labor movement, was hardly a fat cat -- managed to provide all that for him. With a publicly subsidized apartment in Manhattan, they could even afford to rent a house in Amagansett for the summer.

An irony of New York's recent history, Mark says, is that professional-class children sometimes find themselves taking handouts from their thrifty working-class parents. Mark and his wife, who both attended excellent colleges, were living in a tiny co-op in the Village in 1996, and the birth of their daughter created a crisis of space. His mother-in-law, a schoolteacher, rescued them by putting up part of the money for a down payment on a brownstone in a then-sketchy neighborhood of Brooklyn -- $100,000, a third of the $330,000 the building cost. "It was a big break for both of us," he says.

They rent out two floors of the brownstone, which pretty much covers the mortgage if not the $1,500 a month in upkeep. Still, the family has to keep a tight budget and almost never eats out. "For birthdays and so forth, there are cheap Jamaican and Mexican places," he says. "I can get a chicken tamale for a buck fifty. Our groceries we buy mostly in bulk, or at Key Food -- pasta, pork chops, chicken, lentil soup. We are fortunate in that we have a 15-year-old American car that belonged to my parents, which we park in a friend's garage." Last year they took a rare vacation, a week at a relative's house on the Jersey shore.

Next challenge: educating his daughter, who is now in preschool. "We're concerned about the quality of the public schools in the neighborhood as they stand now," Mark says. He is busy looking at his options -- maybe trying to get his daughter bused to a lower-Manhattan public school, accepted at a Catholic school, or maybe even a coveted private-school scholarship. "You hustle whatever way you can in New York," he says.

Miraculously, Mark and his wife have managed to stow away $5,000 in savings over the past few years, which they invested entirely in stocks. Its value has soared to around $22,000. "The way the stock market goes can save you or it will kill you, because you become dependent on that for your retirement," Mark says. "I do work a lot of hours -- usually at least 60 a week. But there is nothing wrong with working real hard, and I can't complain. I'm in a good position compared to a lot of people -- we have shelter, and I don't have to worry about getting kicked out. As long as I hold up physically, I'm all right." He hopes soon to buy life insurance, just in case. In all, he reflects, "maybe middle-class is just something that exists outside of New York."

Retail Executive
$250,000

Jacob was a full-time lawyer and spare-time artist when he married Francis, an executive at a large clothing retailer. But after they married, his work began to sell some, she won a big promotion -- suddenly making about $250,000 a year -- and they had their first child. So he decided to become an artist full-time, augmenting her income with the occasional sale. In their late thirties, they are currently confronting one of New York's most hard-won status symbols -- remodeling the kitchen of their two-bedroom Manhattan apartment. "I know so many people who get a Sub-Zero fridge, a microwave," Francis says. "We didn't do any of that. We went through Ikea. You credential it by mixing in stuff from the flea market."

Francis insists she doesn't miss what she can't afford. She makes about $10,000 a month after taxes, of which $4,000 goes to cover rent. "We do pay for a doorman building -- it's a necessity with a stroller. Disposable diapers are expensive, and those kinds of things add up," she told me over the phone from her apartment one evening, baby in hand. "But with the baby, we stay in -- no long social evenings -- which saves a lot of money." Still, it goes fast, and aside from what they're putting into retirement plans, they aren't saving anything.

What they can't afford, at $250,000 a year, is a country house. "Renting a place in the Hamptons would be phenomenally expensive. To live those kinds of lives, you need at least $300,000 a year."

She doesn't feel deprived, she says, because she grew up in the Midwest, where, she says, she learned to pack her own lunch, and not to pay $1.75 for a cup of coffee because she was too lazy to make it. "The people who are really scared are the people whose parents were lawyers and professionals in New York, back when lawyers made money," she says. "There is a terrible fear in New York of not keeping up with your parents."

People like her who grew up outside New York simply get used to less, she says: "I was recently talking at a dinner party with a person who I know for a fact is making about a million a year, and this person was just overjoyed that she owns this terraced house in SoHo and her children have access to a garden. One of those tiny little squares of green. The idea that you should declare triumphantly that your children have access to a garden is bizarre. I wouldn't have thought that for a million dollars that was such a great feather in your cap. But I guess people's caps just have fewer feathers."

She does resent "the mystery cases," friends who carelessly earn $40,000 a year in publishing or the arts but still live improbably well. "I remember when I turned 30, and suddenly friends of mine who really hadn't done much with their careers were starting to buy apartments! Now I see junior members of my staff buying apartments!" she says. "Where the hell did that come from? Inheritance and parental subsidies are incredibly annoying -- I think about that every day."

Her husband, Jacob, the lapsed lawyer, has a gloomier assessment. "The fact is," he says, "that we will never be able to live in New York anywhere near the way our parents did elsewhere. With $250,000 from Francis and occasionally something from me, we make a lot of money! But we don't look very wealthy at all -- a two-bedroom apartment with a half-kitchen! It is comical. To reproduce our parents' standard of living even moderately, we would have to be very, very rich. In New York now, you have to be a capitalist. Only the people who own property and stock are increasing their wealth, and everybody who relies on their labor is just getting fucked. Even the doctors and lawyers, like me! It is a grotesque situation. The idea of selling your time is a waste of time. The best thing to do is sleep in and call up your money manager and ask how your stock portfolio is going.

"Now," he adds, "praying for the crash is basically my only financial strategy. Otherwise, if we want to have a second child, what are we going to do, live in a two-bedroom the rest of our lives? The idea of finding a three-bedroom apartment in Manhattan that we could afford is just a nonstarter. I mean, sure, our standard of living is comfortable -- we are just grumbling that it isn't commensurate with our inflated salaries. But why not grumble about that?"

For Jacob and Francis, financing their son's education is like an ominous cloud on the horizon. "I don't sit around worrying about tuition," Francis says. "There are good teachers everywhere, I suppose. And I am not against being very active in the public schools, trying to find the best one -- arts schools, magnet schools, that kind of thing. You just trust in the kind of . . . I don't know what you do, actually. You just do it, and you figure that something always turns up. Usually."