The Presidential Candidates’ Net Worths

by Joey deVilla on April 14, 2008

For the curious, here are the net worths of the U.S. presidential candidates, as reported in Ramit Sethi’s blog, I Will Teach You to be Rich:

Net worths of John McCain ($40.4 million), Hillary Clinton ($34.9 million) and Barack Obama ($1.3 million)
Taken from I Will Teach You to be Rich.

As one wag put it: “Yeah, Obama’s clearly the one we should be pointing out as the elitist candidate.”

{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }

David 04.14.08 at 4:27 pm

Yeah, I was hanging down at the bar the other day with a guy only pulling in $991,000. There’s no denying he had the common touch though; he explained fully why we’re all so bitter an’ clingin’ to our shotguns an’ gawd an’ stuff.

Joey deVilla 04.14.08 at 4:43 pm

@David: Glad to see that you haven’t abandoned your defense of the downtrodden!

If The Wealthy Barber wasn’t lying to us, a net worth of $1 million is within both yours and my reach (as computer programmers who seem not to have made any crippling financial mistakes) by age 60.

(Chances are, by the time Obama reaches Clinton’s age, he might also have her net worth. Money leads to more money.)

However, if you went up to me and asked whose net worth I’d rather have, I’d take McCain’s. The First Rule of Money is that in the absence of other factors, more money is better than less money.

David 04.14.08 at 5:49 pm

And even more money is better. BTW: because I decided on a life of startups and contracting, I’ve been pathologically shoving every spare cent into paying off the house. Read what you will into that ;-)

Also note that every one of the candidates are pretty close to self-made men, um, persons.

Eli 04.15.08 at 1:48 pm

What’s interesting is if you take the average per year:
McCain - 0.569 million/yr
Clinton - 0.582 million/yr
Obama - 0.028 million/yr

Kate 04.15.08 at 9:18 pm

Rich does not automatically mean elitist, just as poor doesn’t automatically mean classless. Neither is universally true.

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