A cautionary tale. Long ago I knew a young married couple who had difficulty living within their income. They often found themselves, as the expression goes, with too much month at the end of the money. This was long before MasterCard and Visa made consumer credit so widely available, but this couple did have a charge account at one of New York’s more upscale department stores, a store noted for its fancy foods department. So, when their cash on hand ran out a few days before their next paycheck was due, they would live on truffled foie gras and other exotic (and expensive) delicacies. As you might imagine, this habit was hardly sustainable, and so the story of this particular household and its lifestyle did not have a happy ending.

Today, of course, with credit so freely available and interest rates so low, everybody is facing much more immediate temptations to go into long-term debt for short-term pleasures (or, indeed, necessities) and, as a result, the business of rescuing families from the burden of such debt has become a large-scale industry. Keeping a family’s outgo within the limit of its income (no matter how large that may be) has never been easy, but neither has it ever been as difficult as it is in this age of instant gratification.

Another risk factor for all of us who are struggling to make ends meet today, I would suggest, is the profligate example set by our federal government, which seems to run on the proposition that deficits and debts are of no importance whatsoever. Perhaps that’s true – and perhaps not – when one is talking of billions or trillions of dollars, but when it comes to nickels and dimes and dollars, the math is inescapable. (A trillion, you may recall, is a one followed by 12 zeroes, which is perhaps what makes some people think of it as a lot of nothing. If you wanted to spend a trillion dollars, though, you’d have to shell out more than $1.9 million every minute, day and night, for a whole year.)

Another, and even more egregious, bad example for real-life families trying to live within their means can be found in America’s leading corporations. According to a newly released survey of 100 major companies done by Mercer Human Resource Consulting for The Wall Street Journal, the bonuses paid to the CEOs of those firms last year soared 46.4% – in many cases increasing much faster than the profits of the companies they run. Five of those CEOs received larger bonuses last year than the year before even though their companies’ profits had actually declined.

The median bonus paid to the 100 CEOs in the survey was $1.14 million, and their median total direct compensation (including salary, bonus, stock grants, and gains from exercising stock options and other incentives) was $4,419,300. Among the most lavishly remunerated, according to the survey, were Michael Eisner of the Walt Disney Co., who received a cash bonus of $7.25 million last year; Joseph W. Luter III of Smithfield Foods, who received a bonus of $6.6 million; and John Tyson of Tyson Foods, whose bonus was $5.4 million. As The Journal pointed out, Mr. Tyson’s company was the target of a recent SEC investigation into alleged accounting improprieties, and 45% of the shares voted at the annual meeting of Mr. Eisner’s company opposed his reelection to the company’s board.

One can only imagine that the recipients of such extravagant sums do not face the same pressures faced by you and me to make ends meet, but that is not necessarily true for the companies handing out such sums. If they are overpaying their executives, that has to put a dent in their bottom line.

There is one other point that should cause some concern to those among us who prize prudence and fiscal responsibility, whether on the corporate, governmental or personal level: The Journal points out that the survey did not include the CEOs of any Wall Street firms – where, it notes, “much higher” bonuses are common. But that’s a cautionary tale for another time.