If you can't live on 100K, I'll take it.

Wah wah wah. $100,000 isn't what it used to be.

According to this hilarious Nyuk Times article, $100K is so low brow that even the harmless $100,000 candy bar has now become the 100 GRAND candy bar.

I don't live in New York, I live in Boston. Everyone tells me how expensive Boston is and quite honestly it seems preferable to be poor and only making $100K in New York than to be poor and only making $100K in Boston, but poor in this case is relative.

Really, really, relative.

I don't make anything close to $100K and if any of my friends do they are hiding it well indeed. But if Patricia Belden is to be believed, then I am practically a pauper.

"When Patricia Belden, a 39-year-old developer of affordable housing in Boston, was a student at Cornell University in the mid-80's, she dreamed of a six-figure income. "I would be satisfied with the life that would buy," she recalled thinking. Ms. Belden passed that milestone and is not complaining. But when she and her husband, a violin maker, recently shopped for a home in Boston for themselves and their newborn son, they settled for a loft in the city's trendy South End.

Sounds chic, Ms. Belden allowed, except the family has subdivided a space the size of a large studio into a three-bedroom apartment, what she calls "a ranch house in the sky."

The couple's big extravagance was a permanent parking space for $20,000. "My father told me, 'Honey, don't worry, we paid $20,000 for our first parking space,' " Ms. Belden said. "But it came with a house and a garage."

You don't "settle" for a loft in the city, you "choose" to live in a trendy area. And quite frankly Ms. Belden should be embarassed to "allow" that it sounds chic. It is chic. The South End has become the most obnoxiously self-absorbed neighborhood in all of Boston. Honestly, who on earth needs a million dollar floor through apartment, or for that matter a Land Rover in the city. Please.

It's ridiculous enough that Ms. Belden is an affordable housing planner who split up the space the "size of a large studio" into a three bedroom apartment, but I want to know where she got a parking space for $20K. I think that it was probably closer to $40K.

I wonder if Ms. Belden knows that a few blocks over on the wrong side of Mass Ave she could get a whole house for half what she paid for her ranch in the sky. I bet her $100,00o would go twice as far.

So if there is anyone out there reading this who has a hundred grand they can't live on, please, send it my way and I can show you how to make it last for at least three and a half years.