I just discovered (via this
Ars Technica article) that the Financial Disclosure forms required for members of Congress are a data-nerd's gold-mine. Ever wanted to see how a random person invests? (meaning, not a pre-selected aspiring Mustachian coming to this forum for advice). That's not a chance we often get, but here are hundreds of such people! The disclosures let you peek pretty thoroughly into their entire financial situation, which is kind of fun.
The first three Congressmen from my state that I clicked on all had interesting things to note, and I wasn't sure whether this thread would be better here, or at the Antimustachian Wall of Shame and Comedy!
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Jan Schakowsky: Between her and her husband, they have maybe a dozen stock and bond mutual funds, several individual stocks, and a few bank accounts. Nothing Vanguard, and probably some fairly expensive funds. A little messy but nothing too crazy. Maybe most-encouraging of all, the biggest single asset is $50k-$100k in a 529 College fund (no other fund/account is greater than $50k, and most are much smaller).
But let's look at the liability side. Two mortgages, one on their home in Evanston, IL, the other on a summer home in Michigan City, Indiana, totaling between $350k-$750k, plus a home equity loan between $15k-$50k. That's a lot of debt, but probably not too out-of-the-norm. But then, HOLY SHIT,
they have $80k-$165k in credit card debt!! Three separate cards, two from her spouse, so maybe that's some of what's going on, but, WTF?
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Aaron Schock: he's only 33, so he has a nice simple portfolio: a credit union account, a couple of property investments, and a taxable and Roth IRA account at Wells Fargo. The fun thing for him is that he just pasted his whole Wells Fargo statement into his disclosure, so we have exact details and not just price ranges. Hmm, maybe it's not so simple after all! His taxable + Roth grew about 24% in 2013 ($79k to $99k), which maybe isn't too bad, but it's hard to compare to anything since his taxable account has 18 funds and his Roth has 13. WTF?! He presumably has an adviser picking his funds, and I guess that's how they make it seem like they're doing something? Just buy tons of different funds? To his adviser's credit, nothing was bought/sold in 2013, but to Schock's discredit, he also added $0 to his investments in 2013.
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Brad Schneider: So the first two people each had a couple dozen different accounts/funds/properties to list. A little high and little messy, IMO. But Brad Schneider? He has
seven hundred!!! It takes 37 pages to list all the holdings, and another 30 to list the transactions (which involves a lot of both buying and selling). It almost looks like a master list of "All possible securities available to purchase in the investment universe" rather than a personal portfolio. Stocks, funds, bonds, property-things, from all different institutions. Many of the dozens of separate
accounts are held at Mesirow Financial, and, a-ha, his wife is a senior managing director at Mesirow Financial! Now it's starting to make some sense. Still, I can find no explanation for owning so many different things, beyond a pathological condition not too different from hoarders who fill their house with a thousand shoeboxes. There's no possible way anyone could make sense of what they own, and it can't actually make anything better for them! To their credit, their only debt is a home equity loan. Go Brad.
Here are the links to search for House and Senate:
http://clerk.house.gov/public_disc/financial-search.aspxhttps://efdsearch.senate.govPost here fun stuff you find about your representatives!