I happened to come across this article below about a Wall Streeter who lost his job and ended up waiting tables. He's going to lose his condominimium and his family is on the skids.

Way back in 1996 I spent 6 months in NYC working as a Russian translator, in the World Trade Center of all places, and I had casual conversations with a few stock broker types -- the guys with the blue shirts and the white collars. I told them their white collars are their gang colors, and they symbolize "white collar crime." I also told them, "it's unsustainable. Make sure you don't live high on the hog. Save a lot of money, because this wealth is a fleeting fortune, it's not necessarily going to be there for you forever. You save now, you can retire comfortable when the collapse hits."

None of them took me seriously. Not one. Some of them were insulted, some laughed. They all considered themselves endowed by their Creator with the inalienable right to mountains of wealth. They didn't understand the fleeting nature of their financial fortune, and it is fleeting for all but a few.

When I was 11 my father lost his job and my parents got divorced, and ever since I have understood quite well that there is no stability. When times are good, save money, AND do other enriching things like learn a musical instrument that you can enjoy when times are no longer flush.

You need to have a lot of things to fall back on that don't require money, like playing a musical instrument, qigong, yoga, learning a foreign language if there are native speakers of the target language to you available on a daily basis, either in person or via Skype. I have known for a long time that personal resources are more valuable, if not as readily tradable, as financial resources.

People have sacrificed the accumulation of personal resources in favor of financial resources. Whenever I have had a job that required more than 40 hours a week, I immediately thought, "How is this worth it if I can't develop and maintain my personal resources? What's all this money worth if I can't do that?"

This has happened because money has truly become an object of religious fanaticism. Imagine that! Mammon stands astride the earth, his star is ascendant! Anything you could possibly want, you can purchase with Mammon's magic paper, and anything you can't purchase, isn't worth having! This is truly how a large percentage of the population thinks. This is why life on Earth in a certain sense has become Hell. Heaven and Hell is what we make right here. People kill their whole families and themselves over this.

I mock Mammon with my contentedness! In another thread I was thinking that maybe I'm missing out because I lack religion, but then I realized I actually have a religion -- basically Buddhism, to give it a name, though I have never actually done anything but read a few things about Buddhism and Taoism and say, "yep, that's exactly how I think."

My Buddhism might also simply be my reaction to these circumstances. In another time I might have been a monotheist. Who knows? When Mammon reigns, Buddhism is the solution to it because it is about taking control of desires, rather than being a slave to them. One does not eliminate desires, but steers them in a better direction. Instead of NASCAR races and football games and having a car that goes VROOOM VROOOM and highly stimulating mass media, I steered desires towards quiet things like playing my own instrument and gardening and doing qigong and riding a bicycle and going fishing and doing my own business rather than hustling for a boss.

I realized that cultivating calm and contentedness would make me able to laugh back at the sadistic trickster Mammon. I only serve Mammon begrudgingly and minimally.

http://finance.yahoo.com/career-work/article/107145/From-Ordering-Steak-and-Lobster-to-Serving-It

Carlos Araya used to order lobster, filet mignon and $200 bottles of red wine at the Palm Restaurant in midtown Manhattan.

Now, he seats customers at its Tribeca branch.

Mr. Araya, 38 years old, lost his job in 2007 as a crude oil trader on the New York Mercantile Exchange. After visiting dozens of headhunters with no luck, he applied in August 2008 to be a host at the Palm to support his wife, two young daughters and mortgage payments. His salary has plunged from $200,000 to $25,000.

If the financial crisis was the flood, then the Arayas are one of the families standing in the stagnant waters left behind. Some former Wall Street employees, highly trained and accustomed to comfortable salaries, are having trouble translating their specialized skills to other fields that pay well, and instead find themselves forced to accept low-wage work. Now, Mr. Araya is on the brink of losing it all and is doubtful that he will ever return to Wall Street.

And he isn't alone. Nearly 25,000 jobs have been lost in New York City's financial sector since August 2007, according to the New York State Department of Labor. The finance industry in New York is expected to lose 56,800 jobs from the end of 2007 to the beginning of 2012, according to projections from the Independent Budget Office, a publicly funded information agency.