Kavanaugh's finances

[Anonymous]

If you fired everyone who excelled at their day job but made bad personal finance decisions, there would be many vacancies

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Even as an appeals court judge, he never would retire so didn’t really need retirement savings except to support his wife after he is gone. But I would never be that far in debt on credit cards. We pay off every month. Unless he was buying a big block of tickets for friends and waiting for them to pay him back, it’s stupid to buy tickets you don’t have cash for.

I sort of assumed he had family money—what did his dad do?

None of us can count on that. Senility, dementia, chronic disease - it is downright stupid to forgo retirement savings based on "never retiring."

I am boggled that anyone with his education would be so stupid. It tells us that he has terrible, terrible judgment.

None of those things will remove you from the bench. There are plenty of senile and very infirm senior status judges who still get paid. They get good clerks who push out the work and, if they are appellate judges, sit on panels where their colleagues cover for them. If I was guaranteed to be paid six figures until the day I dropped dead, regardless of how much work I did, I might also blow my retirement on fun stuff.

Have you ever cared for someone with Alzheimer’s, or significant dementia? Some people forget how to speak, do not recognize anyone, do not know/remember how to swallow.

My mother lived like this for years.

Have you ever spent time with a person with ALS? Or Parkinson’s? People in advanced stages of these diseases can barely handle the activities of daily living, much less a job. Of any kind. No matter how much support was built in.

There is absolutely no way that someone with that degree of infirmity could work. No way.

Typically, Alzheimer's is a very long, slow road. So there is quite a long time in many cases between forgetting and not being functional able to care for oneself. But sadly, I agree with the poster that you are responding to -- there are some judges with fairly serious memory issues sitting on the bench.

Once he’s entitled to senior status (which would be at age 59 for him, given how young he was when he was appointed), he could receive full slash even if he’s in a coma and hearing no cases. So he really doesn’t need retirement savings. (Except to cover the 5-10 years that his wife will likely outlive him.). He needs a fat life insurance policy in case he gets hit by a bus.

[Anonymous]

Full salary, not slash. Hate auto-correct.

[Anonymous]

The baseball ticket explanation doesn't make sense to me as the whole story. We're not talking about a single card that had $50k in debt on it; if we were, it would be plausible to me that he and some friends went in on a season's pair of presidents box seats and they paid him back. He had debt spread over three different credit cards, and maybe he did spread a single purchase over three cards because his limits were too low, but when you have balances like that on multiple cards, more typically that's debt from a lot of different things piling up on the cards because you're spending more than you can afford every month.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Why do people keep talking like he spent his entire career in public service? The guy was a Kirkland & Ellis partner for crying out loud.

i don't think he was ever a K&E equity partner. big law associate salaries were not high in the 90s - starting salaries were WELL under 6 figures. They didn't start getting astronomical until 2000 - when one of the silicon valley firms raised salaries, and the other big law firms jumped in and started a wave of salary increases. so it sounds like he was only there for a short while before the gravy train salaries began.

It looks like he was at Kirkland from around 98-2001. He’s a 1990 grad I think so he was likely hired out of the govt as a non equity partner bc KE has a 3 year non equity track but he left within 3 yrs and joined the Bush administration.

This is it exactly! And non-share partners are not employees at Kirkland, so there's a tax burden there that isn't immediately apparent when you look at the "salary." Not to mention health insurance. Clerkship bonuses were much more modest back then, too.

Couple the years of government service with a growing family and it is hard to build wealth. But there is no indication that he has done anything wrong at all. Credit card debt and TSP loans might be unwise, but they're certainly not illegal!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:We spend about 3K/year on really awesome Nats tickets. We are part of a group that spends a much bigger dollar amount in total. Someone puts that whole amount on a credit card and that gets paid back. I doubt he ultimately paid more than a few thousand for his own tickets.

Federal financial reporting for judges I suspect is a lot like reporting for SES level employees. You report your debt at a given point in time and it is in ranges. It is how much you owed that month. The debt could be $60K or it could be $200K, we do not know. And we do not know the amount or what the TSP loan was for.

FWIW, I am a long time fed, 53 years old with twice as much in my TSP (as does my DH) and a $350K HHI. We do not have kids in private.

He is not a financial genius, nor is he an idiot. This is what UMC living is like in DC for many.

UMC living in DC is taking TSP (401K) loans out for Nats tickets? No, no it's not.
That's idiocy.

[Anonymous]

Look, I very much dislike Kavanaugh's politics (as an aside let's please dispense with the notion that judges aren't political), but this kind of personal finance mismanagement (while personally embarrassing and really kind of pathetic) in no way affects his qualification or character to sit on the bench. The people talking about bar discipline for character & fitness or security clearances are a bit much.

That said, it is really pathetic for a 50+ year old with these incomes to have such poor finances. Funny that the conservative "old soul" (as I've seen him described in the press) is really stretched so thin on credit card debt and very little savings.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:We spend about 3K/year on really awesome Nats tickets. We are part of a group that spends a much bigger dollar amount in total. Someone puts that whole amount on a credit card and that gets paid back. I doubt he ultimately paid more than a few thousand for his own tickets.

Federal financial reporting for judges I suspect is a lot like reporting for SES level employees. You report your debt at a given point in time and it is in ranges. It is how much you owed that month. The debt could be $60K or it could be $200K, we do not know. And we do not know the amount or what the TSP loan was for.

FWIW, I am a long time fed, 53 years old with twice as much in my TSP (as does my DH) and a $350K HHI. We do not have kids in private.

He is not a financial genius, nor is he an idiot. This is what UMC living is like in DC for many.

UMC living in DC is taking TSP (401K) loans out for Nats tickets? No, no it's not.
That's idiocy.

Again, we do not know what the TSP loan was for and the tickets were season tickets bought as a group, so he was reimbursed probably for 90% of them.

I am a dem and not a fan of him as a new SCOTUS Justice, but this is not as big a deal as people are making it.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:We spend about 3K/year on really awesome Nats tickets. We are part of a group that spends a much bigger dollar amount in total. Someone puts that whole amount on a credit card and that gets paid back. I doubt he ultimately paid more than a few thousand for his own tickets.

Federal financial reporting for judges I suspect is a lot like reporting for SES level employees. You report your debt at a given point in time and it is in ranges. It is how much you owed that month. The debt could be $60K or it could be $200K, we do not know. And we do not know the amount or what the TSP loan was for.

FWIW, I am a long time fed, 53 years old with twice as much in my TSP (as does my DH) and a $350K HHI. We do not have kids in private.

He is not a financial genius, nor is he an idiot. This is what UMC living is like in DC for many.

UMC living in DC is taking TSP (401K) loans out for Nats tickets? No, no it's not.
That's idiocy.

Again, we do not know what the TSP loan was for and the tickets were season tickets bought as a group, so he was reimbursed probably for 90% of them.

I am a dem and not a fan of him as a new SCOTUS Justice, but this is not as big a deal as people are making it.

This plus loads of people have refinanced more than once to take advantage of lower rates. Yes his finances aren't great but they aren't terrible when you look at what an average 50 year old has in retirement savings.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The baseball ticket explanation doesn't make sense to me as the whole story. We're not talking about a single card that had $50k in debt on it; if we were, it would be plausible to me that he and some friends went in on a season's pair of presidents box seats and they paid him back. He had debt spread over three different credit cards, and maybe he did spread a single purchase over three cards because his limits were too low, but when you have balances like that on multiple cards, more typically that's debt from a lot of different things piling up on the cards because you're spending more than you can afford every month.

Every year since 2006 he's filed a financial disclosure and he's had approximately the same level of unsecured debt on 3-4 credit cards (tens of thousands of dollars) and a TSP loan of between $15,000 - $50,000

https://www.judicialwatch.org/document-archive/tag/brett-m-kavanaugh/

In 2016, the level of debt on each credit card went into the $15,000 - 50,000 range. https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4578103-Kavanaugh-BM-J3-DC-R-16.html

Then, all of sudden, a year later, for the first time in his whole history of filing financial disclosures, he had ZERO credit card debt in 2017.

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4578093-Kavanaugh-BM-J3-DC-R-17.html

Hmmm....

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The baseball ticket explanation doesn't make sense to me as the whole story. We're not talking about a single card that had $50k in debt on it; if we were, it would be plausible to me that he and some friends went in on a season's pair of presidents box seats and they paid him back. He had debt spread over three different credit cards, and maybe he did spread a single purchase over three cards because his limits were too low, but when you have balances like that on multiple cards, more typically that's debt from a lot of different things piling up on the cards because you're spending more than you can afford every month.

Every year since 2006 he's filed a financial disclosure and he's had approximately the same level of unsecured debt on 3-4 credit cards (tens of thousands of dollars) and a TSP loan of between $15,000 - $50,000

https://www.judicialwatch.org/document-archive/tag/brett-m-kavanaugh/

In 2016, the level of debt on each credit card went into the $15,000 - 50,000 range. https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4578103-Kavanaugh-BM-J3-DC-R-16.html

Then, all of sudden, a year later, for the first time in his whole history of filing financial disclosures, he had ZERO credit card debt in 2017.

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4578093-Kavanaugh-BM-J3-DC-R-17.html

Hmmm....

As his parents or in-laws still alive? Maybe they bailed him out.

My ex’s parents paid off roughly $70k in CC debt for him in the week before he remarried because wife #2’s parents threw a fit.

[Anonymous]

The fact that he carried the debt on multiple cards for so many years and then it was just somehow magically paid off is VERY SUSPICIOUS.

Coupled with the explanation that he went into debt for baseball tickets, and borrowed from this 401k...well, something is not making sense. Unless "baseball" is a euphemism for "gambling".

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Look, I very much dislike Kavanaugh's politics (as an aside let's please dispense with the notion that judges aren't political), but this kind of personal finance mismanagement (while personally embarrassing and really kind of pathetic) in no way affects his qualification or character to sit on the bench. The people talking about bar discipline for character & fitness or security clearances are a bit much.

That said, it is really pathetic for a 50+ year old with these incomes to have such poor finances. Funny that the conservative "old soul" (as I've seen him described in the press) is really stretched so thin on credit card debt and very little savings.

I know this is a generalization but All of the conservatives that I know in real life are stressed financially and stretched thin. Many of them have great jobs but they just “have” to have a certain car, a certain type of house, just generally a higher standard of living than what they can actually afford. Then they get really frustrated about taxes. It is a definite pattern that I have noticed.

[Anonymous]

Everyone in this thread is so dumb that it is not funny.

As an immigrant, what this man has done is nothing but admirable. He went to Yale for BA and JD and he could have made boat load of money but he rather devotes his life to public service.

My company CEO graduated with BA and JD from Harvard and his total compensation was 4.5M last year and has been 4M+ for the past five years.

With Kavanaugh's pedigree and connection from his days working in the white house, I am sure he will make at least 4M/year if he chooses to but yet you do not define success by wealth. He definitely gets my respect.

You also know that his wife was a personal assistant to former President Bush for many years. If she wanted to, she could have a very cushy job making at least 1M just from that connection but they chose not to. Even more respect to them both.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The fact that he carried the debt on multiple cards for so many years and then it was just somehow magically paid off is VERY SUSPICIOUS.

Coupled with the explanation that he went into debt for baseball tickets, and borrowed from this 401k...well, something is not making sense. Unless "baseball" is a euphemism for "gambling".

It is clearly gambling debt. He may be a real smart dude, and an inspiration to us all or whatever, but this is CLEARLY the result of betting on the ponies.