To Be Announced...

A really interesting story on CNN's Money Magazine page makes me really confused. Given my semi-difficult financial status earlier this year, I wonder what it was we were doing right and these people are doing wrong:

Nebraska Family Barely Scraping By

NEW YORK (Money Magazine) -- If she thought it would really fix her family's finances, Amy Schuett would make it her New Year's resolution to squeeze every bit of extra spending from the family budget.

But she's already slashed so many little luxuries - the gourmet coffee, the restaurant lunches, the weekly dates with husband Brian - that she's fresh out of ideas.

Cable TV? Unplugged. Pool membership? Down the drain.

They've even considered giving up their unlisted phone number. At a cost of $3 a month, this move wouldn't save much - even over, say, 150 years - but it shows how desperate the couple feel about easing their financial strain. "We're struggling week to week to get by," says Brian, 42. "Any money that comes in gets chewed up right away."

All things I considered doing during my unemployment earlier this year. Thankfully, I didn't have to unplug the internet which allowed me to keep the family financially afloat. And double fortunate we sold our other house in South Carolina. But the story gets better, and I would advise our Democrat friends to hold off a little on blaming Bush for the horrible economy and read on...

Digesting that fact becomes harder when you consider that the Schuetts earn a comfortable living, with Amy, 39, pulling in $150,000 a year as a hospital psychiatrist. True, their income did take a big hit last summer when Brian got laid off from his job as a sales rep for a pharmaceutical firm (he'd been making a base salary of $82,000 a year, plus commissions as high as $24,000). And they do have four daughters to raise, ages four to nine.

Prior to "the hit," they had an average income of more than $230,000 dollars. Must be those credit cards, eh? Hmm...

The Schuetts don't have any child-care bills (Brian is now a stay-at-home dad). They don't have credit-card debt. They don't splurge on fancy vacations. And they live in a nice but definitely not luxurious home on a three-acre plot in Elkhorn, Neb., just west of Omaha, where the cost of living is, well, livable.

Yet, says Amy, "We live from one paycheck to the next, we're struggling to save and we never seem to have enough money to do anything fun."

It's a statement that an awful lot of Americans can make these days. About two-thirds of families need their next paycheck to meet their living expenses, according to a recent survey by the American Payroll Association.

Yep...must be Bush after all. I can't think of a single reason this would be happening if not for the lousy economy, can you?

Maybe they can get a job in Marshalltown...I hear there are openings at Swift.