Scraping by on $150,000 a year

From a report on CNN Money, in which psychiatrist Amy Schuett of Omaha, Nebraska has trouble scraping by on a measely $150,000 per year.

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."

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. But still.

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."

And yet we see this:

Last year, for instance, Brian's parents gave the Schuetts a horse named Red for their kids to ride. They think it will cost a few hundred dollars a month to feed and care for the animal, and they're willing to give up ballet lessons and gymnastics classes for the girls to pay for it.

I'm sure that most folks would love to be able to afford a horse for the girls. As seen here, 95% of American households make less than 150,000 a year.