Hillary Clinton

01Overview

02Reconcile the Estimate

Hillary Clinton has not filed a financial disclosure since she ran for president. Her last one, released May 17, 2016, put almost all of the household's money in two accounts: a Vanguard 500 Index Fund and a JPMorgan cash account, each listed at $5 million to $25 million, plus $50,001 to $100,000 of Treasury notes. It listed no debts^{1, 2}. We start there, use the middle of each range, grow the index fund with the S&P 500, and add the homes, which disclosures do not cover.

How the $86M Estimate Is Built

Solid: holdings counted from a filing value, a market price or a public record. Hatched: values we modeled or estimated, including values taken from disclosed ranges.

Scenarios: Where Inside the Ranges

The last disclosure gave ranges, not values, and the Chappaqua house sits in trusts whose terms are not public, so the honest answer is a range too.

Results are rounded to the nearest $1 million. Cash is shown after the $1.16 million house purchase. All four assume the index fund was left alone since 2016 and count no earnings, spending, taxes or gifts since then.

Accounts from her candidate financial disclosure covering January 1, 2015 to mid-May 2016. The index fund is grown with the S&P 500 total return, as if it had been left alone; the cash is held flat, less the house bought after the disclosure. Home values are our assumptions, from purchase prices and 2015 estimates. Whose wealth this is: the household's, hers and Bill Clinton's, since the disclosure covers both and the homes are shared.

Not observable: Whether the index fund was kept, added to or drawn down since 2016; what the couple has earned, spent, paid in tax and given away since then; where each account fell inside its range; and what the homes are worth today. The Chappaqua house was moved into two residence trusts in 2011 for estate planning, so part or all of its value may now belong to the trusts' beneficiaries; the scenarios show the estimate with and without it.

03Published Estimates

Both older figures are household estimates from 2015, built from the same kind of disclosure we start from: Forbes counted about $40 million of assets plus the homes. Our starting point in 2016 is similar, about $30 million of accounts plus the homes. Most of the gap to our figure comes from one assumption, that the index fund stayed invested; if it did, the stock market's rise since then accounts for most of the difference. If it was spent or moved to cash, the gap would be much smaller.

04Positions

05How the Fortune Was Built

06Profile

07What the Last Disclosure Shows

Clinton's 2016 disclosure covered January 1, 2015 to mid-May 2016. It showed a strikingly simple portfolio: a Vanguard 500 Index Fund and a JPMorgan cash account, each at $5 million to $25 million, $50,001 to $100,000 of Treasury notes and five life insurance policies, three of them owned by irrevocable trusts, with no individual stocks and no debts^{1, 2, 3}. The income lines were bigger than the asset lines: more than $5 million of royalties from Hard Choices in 2015, about $1.5 million of her own speaking fees before she began her campaign, and more than $5 million of speaking fees for Bill Clinton. Her book and speech income ran through a company called ZFS Holdings¹.

08Where the Money Came From

Hillary Clinton said in 2014 that the couple left the White House in 2001 "dead broke", owing millions in legal bills. Their tax returns show how quickly that changed: $139.1 million of income from 2007 to 2014, with $43.9 million paid in federal income tax, and adjusted gross income of $10.6 million in 2015, with $3.6 million paid in tax and about 9.8% given to charity⁵. Almost all of it came from speeches and books. Their tax returns have not been released since 2015, and she has not had to file a disclosure since she stopped running for office, so the money earned since 2016 from her later books, speeches and other work is not public.

09The Homes

The Clintons own a house in Washington, bought in 2000 for $2.85 million, and a house in Chappaqua, New York, bought in 1999 for $1.7 million. In 2016 they bought the three-bedroom house next door in Chappaqua for $1.16 million⁴. Financial disclosures do not cover personal homes, and no current appraisal is public; Zillow estimated the Washington house at $5.76 million and the Chappaqua house at $2.3 million in 2015³. We use $6.0 million, $2.5 million and $1.2 million and test lower and higher values in the scenarios. The Chappaqua house was moved into two residence trusts in 2011, a common way to keep future growth in a home's value out of an estate³.

10From the 2016 Disclosure to Today

An illustration of how the estimate is reached, step by step. The disclosure ranges are hers; the market growth is the S&P 500's; the home values and the choice of midpoints are our assumptions.

Not included: anything else earned, spent, paid in tax or given away since 2016; life insurance and pensions. The ten-year growth figure starts in November 2016, six months after the disclosure, so it slightly understates the growth since then.

11Frequently Asked Questions

12Sources and Method