Finance

Tim Walz Has The Finances Of A Guy You'd Like To Have A Beer With

Walz is almost unique among national-level politicians in his relatively modest and relatively simple financial situation.

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(Photo by JIM WATSON CHRIS KLEPONIS/AFP via Getty Images)

Full disclosure right up front here: Tim Walz is a guy I have actually had a beer with. And it was pleasant. I was having so much fun, in fact, that when I started to see stories surface recently saying he’d quit drinking several decades ago, I had to strain to recall what or whether he’d been drinking that night. The fact that I most certainly had been drinking beer myself (we were at a brewery, after all) did not help with the exercise.

At any rate, I’m not drinking (much) right now, which makes this a perfect time to take a bit of a deeper look at the potential VP’s personal finances. Longtime readers may recall that we did the same thing for Kamala Harris some time back. Donald Trump is the architect of so many financial scams that it seems we’re covering some aspect of his finances every few weeks. So, we’re about due for a Walz-a-thon. Let’s see where everyone’s Midwestern dad falls on the financial spectrum of our national leaders.

If you’ve been closely following the news, it is probably no surprise to hear that Walz is almost unique among national-level politicians in his relatively modest and relatively simple financial situation. He owns no stocks, no bonds, and no real estate. His most recent public tax filing, for 2022, showed he earned a paltry $115,485 that year from his salary as Minnesota’s governor.

While it feels kind of good to know I earned more in 2022 than someone who might become the vice president, it’s not as though Walz is exactly a pauper. The median American earned just $48,060 in 2023. Walz also has accumulated substantial retirement assets: he has both state and federal pensions as a former teacher and former congressman, and together they add about $800,000 to his net worth, according to the Wall Street Journal.

When his pensions are combined with his other fairly substantial assets — life insurance and college savings meant for his kids — Walz and his wife have a net worth right in the neighborhood of a million bucks. Not bad, by any means. But still a pittance compared to some of his peers in the national political spotlight.

Way back in 2015, the median net worth of a U.S. senator was $3.2 million (it is difficult to get up-to-the-minute data on this particular metric). A typical member of the House of Representatives was worth a comparatively modest $900,000 at that time (keep in mind the ranks of the House include Lauren Bobert and Marjorie Taylor Greene, and plenty of other people who wouldn’t immediately strike you as having the discipline to be big moneymakers).

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Even only accounting for inflation, the average House member would be a bit above Walz’s net worth by now. Given that people who are already fairly well-off tend to hold a good portion of their wealth in stocks, and the fact that the stock market has been on a tear for years now, it’s safe to say that most members of Congress could buy and sell Walz.

Although ardently conservative opinion outlets may differ, this might not be a negative. For one thing, I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Mankato, where Walz taught and started his political career, but I have: trust me, a net worth of around a million bucks is more than enough to get by just fine there the rest of your life for someone who is already 60.

More importantly, for someone who wants to represent the interests of hundreds of millions of Americans, is that Walz’s bank account looks way closer to normal people’s than that of almost any other national politician. Considering the withering of unions of late, fewer than one in five Americans have a pension these days like Walz does. However, compared to his peers in national politics, his net worth is decidedly more in line with that of everyday American families.

You know, I don’t have that many beers with other millionaires, and it’s not because I can’t. It’s because I don’t like drinking with assholes.

Even though he is a borderline millionaire when considering his pensions, Walz wasn’t an asshole when I had a beer with him. He’s not in a desperate or bad financial situation by any stretch of the imagination. Yet, he’s so much closer than the typical politician to the real financial problems of the average American that one would think he’d have a pretty solid understanding of the concerns of regular people. Hard to cast that as a bad thing.

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Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made 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].

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