Mansione d'Albatrosso

As noted in The New York Times:

"Umberto Milletti has fantasized about downsizing his life to ease the pressures he feels despite a net worth around $5 million. In 2000, when his stake in DigitalThink, the online learning company he co-founded in 1996, was worth around $50 million, he bought his family of four a five-bedroom house in Hillsborough, an upscale suburb south of San Francisco. After his net worth fell 90 percent, though, he found the house more of an albatross than a dream. 'We could move,' Mr. Milletti said. 'But if you do that, then you're admitting defeat. No one wants to go backwards.' So he works 60 to 70 hours a week at InsideView, an online sales intelligence company he co-founded in 2005, in part to prove that his first success was not a fluke -- but also to meet his monthly nut, which includes payments on a seven-figure mortgage."

The federal minimum wage is $5.85 per hour. Let's see. If you put in 70 hours, that gives you a gross (not take-home) total of $409.50. For 70 hours. Not enough for that seven-figure mortgage.

As Bob Dylan said, "When you ain't got nothin', you got nothing to lose."


Mansion photo courtesy of Gordon Gekko, Esq.

For Richer, For Poorer. . .

The genesis of this newly minted blog is a recent article in The New York Times entitled "The Millionaires Who Don't Feel Rich."


Right there, on the upper-left corner of the Sunday NY Times of August 5, 2007, is a photo of one Hal Steger, 51, a marketing executive with an estimated net worth of $3.5 million.


His words form part of The Times's Quotation of the Day:


"But a few million doesn't go as far as it used to."


He is part of a new class, dubbed "working-class millionaires" by the piece's author, Gary Rivlin.


I grew up in a working-class housing project.


I am not a millionaire.


And if I were, would it be enough?


What constitutes "enough"?