Presidential Candidates and Credit Card Debt
Well, I guess once you become a part of a presidential race, nothing is sacred any more, including credit card debt and all kinds of other fun stuff that normally is not of public domain like your past drug use habits, your spouse’s history and other dirt the other opponent may be wanting to get their hands on to make them look better or to destroy credibility. Well, both John McCain and Barack Obama have let their credit card debt records go public for all to see, as well as what they make in a year, broken down by them and their spouse.
Apparently McCain and his wife are at most likely over 225,000 dollars in credit card debt (and you thought you might have had it bad!), and Obama’s actual credit card debt was not actually noted, but it was noted that he and his wife had about one million dollars invested in a money market account and they had also put some 200,000 dollars into college funds for their daughters, so that does make them seem very responsible.
Obama also has gotten quite a lot of money, to the tune of around 4 million dollars, from book royalties, and his wife is no slouch either, in her earnings as a lawyer and then as a hospital administrator. They both disclosed that they had just recently paid off all of their college loans personally, further adding to their everyman status.
As far as McCain goes, he earned substantially less on paper than his wife did, because she is part of a beer distributorship owned by family, and is on the board of directors, which she garners a paycheck from, and also she has holding in Anheuser Busch and other holdings that are worth a substantial amount of money.
The McCains also disclosed that they have a credit card in the name of someone who is described as an independent (a child or someone else financially dependent on them), and that credit card has an exorbitant APR on it, at over 25%, which is horrible. Maybe they should look into getting a good balance transfer credit card with a low fixed APR for that one, that is truly detrimental to anyone in their debt fighting endeavors.
