bright investing

The average Wall Street salary is $300,000, which is decent money unless you happen to live and work in, you know, New York.

NEW YORK (Reuters) — Wall Street workers took home nearly $300,000 on average last year as profits from trading and merger advising fueled record earnings, New York State Comptroller Alan Hevesi said.

Wall Street compensation averaged $289,664 per person, 5.1 times the average $56,634 for workers citywide, the comptroller said in a study released Tuesday. The highest-paid bankers and traders can command eight-figure pay packages.

Reality check: The overall cost of living in New York is 364% the national average, and apartments rentals average $1,600 (if you can find one). Good luck affording a nice house on 300 grand a year. But you can find a nice — if small — apartment for, on average, a million bucks.

Of course, with the average New York income at $56,634, it’s a lot tougher on the average Gotham dweller than on the elusive Wall Street worker. In fact, almost half of New York households are considered “low income” by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. And then there’s this discouraging bit:

Usually housing is considered unaffordable if it costs a household more than 30 percent of its income. With that definition, about 1.1 million of the 3 million households (36.7 percent) are living in housing that is not affordable to them. In fact, over 600,000 (19.9 percent) spend more than 50 percent of their income on housing.

But millions of New Yorkers wouldn’t consider living anywhere else, so they obviously know something I don’t.