Our Congressman is “Very Wealthy.” But Probably Not Rich.

The Senior Assistant Blogger's Congressman, Jeb Bradley (R-NH), faces a primary challenge tomorrow. He's expected to win handily and seek another term in November, despite some unkind words from Ken Silverstein at Harper's online.

With investable assets over $5 million, writes Silverstein, "Bradley is a very wealthy man." Silverstein believes the Congressman should have put his great wealth in blind trust before taking office and voting on matters that might line his own pocket.

Example: When he came to Capitol Hill, Bradley kept 231 shares of Halliburton, then bought 72 more and eventually sold them all for a profit of (brace yourself!) $2,791.08.

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Like Ken Silverstein, I once punched keyboards for a living, and back then five or six million dollars did sound like a lot of money.

These days, it won't even qualify you for entry-level service at Bessemer Trust, minimum $10 million. According to Wall Street wealth rankings we noted earlier this year, you need $7 million to $10 million to be "kinda rich" and $20 million to be actually rich.

(Maria Sharapova, the new U.S. Open women's tennis champion, is reported to have built her investment portfolio up to almost that level, $19 million and counting. You go, girl!)

But $20 million is a long way from being very wealthy. The average top-25 hedge fund manager reportedly makes over $20 million per month. Even after taxes and yacht maintenance, said manager should be able to put aside $5 million a month. If his job lasts a year, that gives him a net worth of $60 million, competitive with Brooke Astor and other society swells.

Now that's wealthy. But not very wealthy, much less "wildly wealthy," as Silverstein terms Bradley in a later posting.

The very wealthy are America's garden-variety billionaires. There are hundreds of them, juding from the Forbes listings.

The wildly wealthy are Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, who are giving away billions by the barrelful but still have plenty more where that came from.

Jim Gust recently mentioned the Brooke Astor case. Anthony Marshall, Astor's son, has been forced to step aside while JPMorganChase and the court look into charges that he has skimped on his mother's care and paid himself too handsomely from Astor assets. I doubt that Marshall thinks of himself as "very wealthy." Yet the papers report that his annual income is in the millions. What's more, his current hobby is producing plays, an avocation that makes yacht maintenance look cheap. Mightn't his investable assets be well above Bradley's $5 million or $6 million?


Bottom line: Everything is relative. "Wealth" is a state of mind. You can't be too thin or too rich. That's good news for owners of exclusive spas, and it bodes well for the future of wealth management.