Most of US President Joe Biden's wealth is related to real estate. Biden made a lot of money the last time he left the White House. Will a second windfall await him in 2025?
The U.S. economy is booming, with U.S. stocks up 15% in the last six months and 24% in the past year. However, due to a range of potential complications, including stagnant home prices, flat wages, high interest rates and stubborn inflation, most Americans do not feel richer than they once were.
Many blame Biden for these problems, rightly or wrongly, but Biden himself has been affected by these factors, and his net worth has stagnated at around $10 million.
About two-thirds of the US president's wealth is locked in his real estate.
He owns two properties in Delaware – a Wilmington mansion and a 4,800-square-foot vacation home in Rehobo Beach. The latter's home prices soared during the pandemic as repressed city dwellers flocked to nature, raising its value to $4.5 million, $1.8 million more than he bought in 2017. However, high interest rates over the past twelve months have cooled U.S. home prices, and two of Biden's properties have not appreciated again.
Biden's salary has also not risen — his annual salary is $400,000, the same as every U.S. president since George W. Bush. But inflation has eroded the purchasing power of this paycheck. George W. Bush's annual salary of $400,000 in 2001 was equivalent to $717,000 today. To increase liquidity, Biden secured a $250,000 credit line in 2022 and withdrew more than $100,000 by the end of 2023. The interest rate on this debt is the benchmark rate plus 1.99%, which means that as interest rates rise, the president's borrowing costs will also increase.
Despite the challenges, Biden is in good financial shape, especially given his civilian origins that he has long been proud of. "Like a lot of people, I grew up in a middle-class family, with four children and a grandfather living in our three-bedroom split-level house." Speaking at a Detroit campaign event last month, Biden said, "But we're doing well." Although I don't have much money, I'm doing well. ”
Eventually, his father gained a foothold by selling stations, and Mr. Biden enrolled at the University of Delaware and later Syracuse University law school. After graduating, Biden returned to Delaware, joined a law firm, and later became a part-time public defender, supplementing his income by defending civil lawsuits. In 1971, he quit these jobs and started his own practice.
As an adult, Biden's finances have always been tied to real estate.
Biden, who was confident about the future at the time, was eager to build a home for his small family, so he began to buy houses in 1969, spending a lot of his own money and borrowing more from other places. His father-in-law offered a loan for his house in Newark, Delaware, but it wasn't long before Biden set his eye on another property in Wilmington. He persuaded his parents to buy a second home, then bought their old home himself and rented it out. He himself lives in a nearby cottage and manages a country club's swimming pool in exchange for free accommodation. "I'm probably the only lawyer in Delaware who works part-time as a lifeguard on Saturdays." Biden wrote in his memoirs in 2007. Soon after, he bought a third property near Maryland, an 85-acre old dilapidated farm, which he planned to move in and build a family compound.
Saddled with three bank mortgages and owed money to his father-in-law, Mr. Biden fell in love with a fourth home, a colonial-style house built in 1723 on four acres 20 minutes north of Wilmington. In order to buy the house, he sold the other three properties. In the early '70s, when Biden won his first big lawsuit and received a check for $5,000, he and his first wife decided to splurge it. "We went to the best furniture store in the state and bought a four-poster bed, a set of dining room facilities, and a large table in my downtown office," Biden wrote in his memoirs. It really cost a lot of money at the time, even more than $5,000, but the furniture was really good. ”
After that, Biden did not stop spending big money. He developed a lifelong habit of using his property to take out a mortgage whenever he needed it. In 1972, in the final days of his Senate campaign, he secured a $20,000 loan from his new house to keep his campaign ads on the radio. The gamble paid off – he defeated and replaced a senator who had never lost a statewide campaign for 26 years in a row.
The young newly elected senator wasn't content to own just one property for too long. As he was about to start a new job with a salary of $42,500, Biden decided to borrow more money from his father-in-law to buy a colonial-style house in Chevy Chase, an upscale neighborhood in Washington.
However, just days after their offer to buy the house was accepted, the Biden family suffered a car accident in which his wife, Neilia, and infant daughter, Naomi, were killed, and his two sons, Beau and Hunter, were also injured. Shortly thereafter, the newly widowed Senate set out to sell his home in Delaware. "Not because there are too many memories there," he wrote in his memoirs, "on the contrary, because there are so few memories left there – it is a testimony to the shattering of our dreams." The house was still empty, as if to remind us that some dreams would never come true. ”
In 1975, three years after the financial crisis, Mr. Biden bought a 10,000-square-foot (445-square-meter) mansion with two separate wings that was once the property of one of America's wealthiest families, the DuPonts. During Biden's 2020 presidential campaign, when he had sold the property for a long time, Trump's son, Eric Trump, and others dug up the property to accuse Biden of corruption. But in fact, the reason why Biden can afford this mansion is really unremarkable. In his memoirs, he wrote: "It stands to reason that I couldn't afford this house, but under the dual effects of the economic recession and the energy crisis at the time, it had no price. So Biden borrowed $160,000 and eventually bought the property for $185,000.
The Bidens have lived in this house for 20 years and have kept it as some kind of savings account. Whenever he needed liquidity, he put the property on a mortgage and then borrowed more and more as time went on.
In 1996, he sold the house for $1.2 million and bought a nearby plot of land for a $350,000 down payment. Subsequently, Biden made another attempt to build a family compound, building two houses on the land. He also treated it like a piggy bank, repeatedly refinancing it as collateral. During his tenure as vice president, he also used the property to earn some extra money, such as renting his cottage to the Secret Service, which is said to pay him $26,400 a year during his tenure as vice president.
After Obama left the White House, Biden entered the private sector for the first time since 1972. As he wrote books and gave speeches, cash rolled in, earning him $11.1 million in 2017. Then Mr. Biden did what he always loved to do: put his money into real estate and bought a summer home in Rehoboth Beach for $2.7 million. He also took out a mortgage on that house. Biden lent $15,000 to $50,000 in 2022 under a line of credit, and then added at least $50,000 last year (the disclosure only asked politicians to list the value range of the loan), according to financial disclosures (the disclosures only asked politicians to list the value range of the loans).
As for the rest of Biden's wealth portfolio, it is ordinary assets — for example, his $1 million pension, Jill's $250,000 pension, annuities and some cash. But Biden may soon have a chance to add to his fortune: Typically, U.S. presidents have the opportunity to make a fortune after their term ends. If he can't stay in the White House, then Biden will most likely find another house he wants to buy.
This article is translated from
https://www.forbes.com/sites/zacheverson/2024/06/22/heres-how-much-joe-biden-is-worth
文:Zach Everson
翻译:Sunny&Bella
Proofreading: Vivian
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