Novelists and Money

I suppose there is no man in this Vanity Fair of ours so little observant as not to think sometimes about the worldly affairs of his acquaintances, or so extremely charitable as not to wonder how his neighbour Jones, or his neighbour Smith, can make both ends meet at the end of the year.

William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair

Thackeray addresses, in a way that novelists surprisingly seldom do, our intense curiosity about our neighbors' finances, especially in Chapters 36 and 37 0f Vanity Fair, "How to live well on Nothing a Year" and "The Subject continued." Tom Wolfe, many years later in 1987, takes up the Thackerayan approach in this famous passage from The Bonfire of the Vanities:

I'm already going broke on a million dollars a year! The appalling figures came popping up into his brain. Last year his income had been $980,000 but he had to pay out $21,000 a month for the $1.8 million loan he had taken out to buy the apartment. What was $21,000 a month to someone making a million a year? That was the way he thought of it at the time- and in fact, it was merely a crushing, grinding burden - that was all! It came to $252,000 a year, none of it deductible, because it was a personal loan, not a mortgage.(The cooperative boards in Good Park Avenue Buildings like his didn’t allow you to take a mortgage on your apartment). So, considering the taxes, it required $420,000 in income to pay the $252,000. Of the $560,000 remaining of his income last year, $44,400 was required for the apartment’s monthly maintenance fees; $116,000 for the house on Old Drover’s Mooring Lane in Southampton…Entertaining at home and in restaurants had come to $37,000. This was a modest sum compared to what other people spent…The Taliaferro School, including the bus service, cost $9,400 for the year. The tab for furniture and clothes had come to $65,000… The servants...came to $62,000 a year. That left only $226,200, or $18,850 a month, for additional taxes and this and that, including insurance payments (nearly a thousand a month, if averaged out), garage rent for two cars ($840 a month), household food ($1,500 a month), club dues (about $250 a month) - the abysmal truth was that he had spent more than $980,000 last year. Well, obviously he could cut down here and there - but not nearly enough - if the worst happened! There was no getting out from under the $1.8 million loan, the crushing $21,000-a-month nut, without paying it off or selling the apartment and moving into one far smaller and more modest - an impossibility! There was no turning back! Once you had lived in a $2.6 million apartment on Park Avenue - it was impossible to live in a $1 million apartment!

Somehow this passage seems quite pertinent at our particular juncture in U.S. history. Adjust all the amounts upward by a multiple of at least ten.