Hyderabad: As Democrat Joe Biden is inching towards victory in the US Presidential elections, questions have popped up regarding his net worth.
Early life:
Joe first started earning a salary in law and practised as a public defender in the 1960s. Biden also joined the political world when he was elected into a county council seat in Delaware and also practised law. In 1972, Joe made a full move to politics to become the junior US senator from Delaware.
At the age of 30, the politician was the sixth youngest senator in US history. Joe continued to work in the senate until 2009 and his salary grew to £129,000 by the time he left. He held the position from 2009 to 2017 and earned an impressive salary of £171,000.
Income from three sources
Joe topped up his bank balance with his book Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics. Biden earned $16.7 Million after leaving The White House. Biden and his wife Jill earned $22.5 million from 1998 to 2019. Bidens earned three-quarters of that money since Joe left his post as vice president in 2017, according to an analysis of their tax returns.
Before Biden entered the West Wing, he and his wife Jill mostly earned income from three sources. First, Biden brought in about $155,000 a year as a U.S. senator.
He had a teaching gig at Widener University on the side, which generated roughly $20,000 annually. Third, Jill earned about $60,000 a year from the State of Delaware.
Biden's wife worked as an English professor at Delaware Technical Community College. The couple made about $230,000 in a year.
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Total Earnings:
When Biden became the Vice President, he got a pay raise. He made about $225,000 a year during his eight years in the White House. Jill got a new job closer to D.C., teaching at Northern Virginia Community College, which paid her an average of $83,000 a year.
In 2009, the Bidens also began collecting real money from Social Security, as well as pensions and annuities, according to their tax filings.
The couple earned about $385,000 in Social Security benefits between 2009 and 2019. They also collected about $890,000 from pensions and annuities over the same time frame. Biden, who was 66 when he became vice president, had only collected about $6,500 from Social Security before 2009.
Other sources of income:
Other sources of income include a cottage in Wilmington, Delaware which the Secret Service reportedly rented. Between 2010 and 2016, the Bidens took in about $17,000 of net earnings per year from the property.
In 2012, Jill published a children’s book called Don’t Forget, God Bless Our Troops. The following year, she reported $24,400 of author earnings. When Biden left the West Wing, the big money started coming.
In 2017, the Bidens declared $11.1 million in total earnings, nearly twice as much in a single year as they had made in the previous 18 years combined. About $10 million of that flowed through two S-corporations called CelticCapri and Giacoppa.
The Biden campaign explained in a press release last year that the money in those entities came from speaking engagements and book payments connected to Joe’s memoir, Promise Me, Dad, and Jill’s memoir, Where the Light Enters. Publishers Weekly reported in 2017 that the couple’s book deal with Flatiron Books was valued at $8 million.
In February 2017, Joe Biden was also named the Benjamin Franklin Presidential Practice Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, a post that earned him a $372,000 salary that year.
The next year, Biden stayed on at Penn, earning $405,000. He and Jill also earned $3.7 million from their books and speaking gigs. Depending on where he was speaking, Joe Biden’s payout varied dramatically.
He earned $8,000 for a stop in Ann Arbor, Michigan, for instance, but he received $190,000 for a speech in Madison, New Jersey, paid for by Drew University, according to his financial disclosure form.
The Bidens’ earnings, which also included payments from pensions and Social Security, totalled $4.6 million in 2018.
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Campaigning for US elections
In 2019, the year that Biden launched his bid for the presidency, he and Jill earned about $1 million. Biden took an unpaid leave of absence from UPenn when he started his campaign in April 2019, so his salary from the university dropped to $135,000.
Biden delivered his final paid speech in Fort Lauderdale on January 28, three months before launching his campaign. By the end of 2019, Biden was a Democratic front-runner and a fairly wealthy man, having earned $16.7 million in three years and built up a net worth of roughly $9 million.
The Bidens invested some of that money into real estate, buying a $2.7 million second home by the water in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, in June 2017. After having given about $70,000 from 1998 to 2016 to charity, they donated more than $1 million in 2017, supporting organizations such as the Catholic Diocese of Wilmington and the United Jewish Federation of Chicago.
In 2018, they gave another $275,800 and in 2019, they doled out $14,700, according to the tax filings. Joe and Jill Biden invested some of their post-White House earnings into real estate.
In 2017, they bought a $2.7 million vacation home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware.
Some of that money also went to the U.S. government. Biden has paid about $6.7 million in income taxes since 1998, $5.5 million of it since 2017. The year he left the White House, the former vice president handed over $3.7 million in federal income tax—or about 5,000 times the $750 that President Donald Trump reportedly paid.
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