A nose job in a hospital with a private nurse in attendance had been something of a rite of passage for Joan Asher's children. But when her fourth and last child was ready for her own rhinoplasty recently, Ms. Asher asked her to postpone it.

The financial markets were simply more out of whack than her 16-year-old's proboscis.

"The other noses were more prominent," the stay-at-home mother from a tony New York City suburb in Westchester County told her 16-year-old daughter. She could get hers done when things settled down.

The financial crisis on Wall Street has New York's well-to-do reeling. The people who fuel the area's economy with their spending on art, fashion, cars, restaurants, plastic surgery and other luxe goods and services are starting to cut back once-lavish budgets. As a result, those who cater to their every whim -- from nanny agencies to jewelers to yacht builders -- are seeing clients tighten their belts on expenses from the millions to the thousands.

At luxury boat builder Northrop & Johnson Yacht and Ship, headquartered in the British Virgin Islands, director Kathleen Mullen says a New York investor called this week trying to put off the purchase of a more than $25 million megayacht. The client's debating whether to back out of the deal completely. He'll still have to pay 10%, Ms. Mullen says, since he'd already signed the contract. "He's undecided about what he wants to do," she says. "People have been very shaken."