Advice for the 'Poor Rich'
online.wsj.com
online.wsj.com
This doesn't include city, state, and any other number of taxes a person pays. Most people pay upwards of 40% in taxes. I feel like this was intentionally left out.
"Mr. Henderson and his wife, an oncologist, make more than $250,000 a year, and apparently they're struggling to get by"
Chicago has a very high tax rate and housing isn't cheap either. According to Wikipedia, the sales tax in Chicago is 9.75% (this has been reduced from over 10%). It's the highest in the country.
(Of course, in Germany politicians talk about how to boost "domestic consumption", and a few years ago there was the "Standardortdebatte", basically whining about how Germany is still an industrial economy and hadn't ascended to service economy, yet.)
Because no one ever taught them that wealth isn't a function of your spending, its a function of retention. For that matter, so is learning...
What you've presented seems like a perfectly rational choice: by moving to a lower-rent apartment they have more money to allocate towards their food budget. If a $5 burrito saves me 30 minutes of cooking, that's a great trade for my time/cash budgeting.
Of course they didn't have fast food, then.
ps: Making a burrito takes 5 minutes with leftovers, not 30.
Consider a perfectly ordinary example: a couple eats at a restaurant twice a week (call it at least $15 per person), they both have their starbucks coffee morning ritual (call it $4 per person per day), and one of them regularly eats out for lunch at work (call it $8 a day). These are all very low estimates, and they are not at all unusual examples. However, all of this money adds up.
How much does it add up to you ask? Over 7,000 dollars a year.
That's a decent used car, every year, or a new car every 2 years. An iPad every month. A laptop every 2 months. A trip for 2 to Hawaii (or the Bahamas) every season. Or buying one or two albums on iTunes or Amazon MP3 every single day, even weekends. If you had a coworker who spent $600 a month on consumer electronics you would definitely consider that conspicuous consumption.