The Notorious RBG Has Had Some Serious ROI

I got some hate mail about my article on Matt Whitaker’s financial disclosures. I know, right? I was surprised too that Matthew Whitaker’s open scammery was the rhetorical hill someone chose to die on.

Still, I’m open to constructive criticism. Part of the email I received included, and I quote, “[w]hat about Hillary….” Well… this column is about the intersection of finance and the law, often viewed through the lens of relevant current events. I’m not sure that looking into the finances of some grandma who hasn’t held any public office in more than five years and who hasn’t run for any public office in more than two years advances what I’m doing here. But it’s fair enough to point out that so far, I’ve taken a look at the personal finances of one Republican acting Attorney General, and one Supreme Court nominee chosen by a Republican president. I’m not at all pretending to be completely unbiased in this column. In the words of Stephen Colbert, “reality has a well-known liberal bias.” But I do think that the financial incentives bearing down on the decision-making processes of those in power, Republican or Democrat, are important. While we may not always fully understand these incentives, we can at least discuss them intelligently.

So today I have chosen to put a progressive in power under the magnifying glass. Today, we’re going to look into the personal finances of a legal legend: Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

RBG Has A Broad Range Of Investments

If you want a truly deep dig into RBG’s personal finances, you better get Ronan Farrow on the line or offer me a six-month sabbatical from my law practice. Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s latest financial disclosure form, dated May 15, 2018, has 103 entries under the investments and trusts category. Dissecting all of those would take a while.

The sheer number of her investments gives you an idea of what one of these forms might look like for someone who has spent a lifetime responsibly building wealth (in contrast, Matthew Whitaker had 13 entries on his latest financial disclosure forms that were arguably comparable categorically, although decidedly not comparable qualitatively; Brett Kavanaugh had six). In addition to a great number of investments, Ruth Bader Ginsburg has zero debt. To be fair, RBG is 85 years old. She has had a lot more time than some of her colleagues to build her investments. She also had some help from her now deceased husband, who was part of what RBG described herself as a shared earning/shared parenting marriage.

Quantity only counts for so much when it comes to investments, but RBG seems to have quality covered too. Her investments mostly consist of retirement accounts, stock funds, and bond funds. She’s got some pretty standard index funds on there, including the Russell Mid-Cap, for instance. Like all of us who hold index funds, she’s tangentially invested in tiny parts of hundreds of companies that she probably doesn’t know anything about. Some companies in just about any index fund lean to the malevolent side. But the worst I found in the top 10 holdings of the Russell Mid-Cap index fund were two natural gas energy companies and a financial services technology company. At least her index fund isn’t a private prison hellscape like some of mine are.

All told, Ruth Bader Ginsburg has a wide breadth of investments and nothing that immediately stands out as unusual or particularly concerning. She seems to have built a solid portfolio over the years.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Net Worth

Okay, let’s get down to brass tacks (yes, it’s “tacks,” not “tax,” and there are some interesting theories behind that idiom if you have time to look them up, which let’s face it, you do if you’re pausing your day to read about Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s net worth).

RBG’s net worth is hard to tell with precision, since Supreme Court justices only have to disclose their assets within broad ranges and the cash value of investments fluctuates over time. Time estimated RBG’s minimum net worth at about $4 million as of this summer. My own count, per her latest financial disclosure forms, puts her net worth at between $4.84 million and $11.02 million (keep in mind that her portfolio contains a lot of stocks, which have fluctuated wildly in value since the end of her last reporting period).

Any point within that range is a respectable net worth, particularly for someone like Ruth Bader Ginsburg whose legal career prior to entering the judiciary was in academia and public interest work. In addition to her many other accomplishments, the Notorious RBG can say she is well-prepared for a comfortable retirement, and/or to leave a nice nest egg for her heirs. For her sake, and for ours, I sincerely hope she doesn’t have to put her fortune to use for either of those outcomes within the next two years.

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Jonathan Wolf is a litigation associate at a midsize, full-service Minnesota firm. He also teaches as an adjunct writing professor at Mitchell Hamline School of Law, has written for a wide variety of publications, and makes it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at [email protected].