In 1981, less than six months after he was elected mayor of Burlington, Vermont, Bernie Sanders was asked about money.

“Accumulating money and material possessions aren’t my interests,” the self-described socialist told a freelance writer, according to a transcript of the interview filed in Sanders’ papers at the University of Vermont. “Having money is the freedom of not having to worry about paying off debts. I’d like to travel, but I have no great desire to be rich.”


He’s not.

He wasn’t rich then, and he isn’t rich now, at least not relative to his Senate colleagues or the other 2016 presidential candidates, nearly half of whom are among the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans. With a net worth of $419,000, according to a POLITICO analysis, Sanders and his wife are comfortably members of the richest 30 percent club.

Money, though, is the central engine for Sanders’ personal and political histories. Marked by a lower middle-class upbringing in a three-and-a-half-room, rent-controlled walk-up in Flatbush, Brooklyn, and more than a decade of early adulthood in Vermont in which he lived hand-to-mouth, the 74-year-old sees everything through the prism of the nexus of money and justice. In his 1997 book, Outsider in the House, which he wrote with his friend Huck Gutman, he called it a simple formula: “wealth = power, lack of money = subservience.”

Everybody could have enough money, Sanders believes, if nobody was allowed to have too much.

“His commitment to those who are not ruling is deep and abiding,” his old friend Gene Bergman said in an interview with POLITICO. “It’s really based on who he is.”

Sanders makes a salary of $174,000 a year as a member of the Senate. In his recent presidential financial disclosure form, he reported $194,026 to $741,030 in assets — listing all of them in his wife’s name. Two years ago, according to Senate financial disclosures, he had an estimated net worth of $330,000, good for 86th on the wealth chart for the chamber — much less than the average net worth of more than $1 million for Congress, not quite $3 million for the Senate and roughly $32 million for Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton.

Sanders owns a house in Burlington that he bought in 2009 for $405,000 and a house in Washington that he bought in 2007 for $489,000, according to property records in both places.

He has two Visa credit cards, through the Congressional Federal Credit Union and the U.S. Senate Federal Credit Union, on which he owes somewhere between $25,002 and $65,000, at friendly interest rates of 8.5 percent and 10.25 percent, respectively.

For having been Burlington’s mayor for eight years, he gets an annual pension of approximately $5,000.

One of Sanders’ enduring childhood memories is of his parents arguing over money. His mother was a homemaker, and his father sold paint. Both were dead by the time Sanders was 22. “I learned what havoc and pain is caused by the constant worry over money,” he once said in a story in the Vermont Vanguard Press. “People who come from money sometimes don’t understand that anxiety.”

The first place Sanders lived after he moved from New York to Vermont in 1968 was a dirt-floor sugar shack a quarter-mile into the woods off a winding road outside the small town of Middlesex.

He relocated for a brief time to a rural and poor part of the state called the Northeast Kingdom.

By the start of the 1970s, he settled in Burlington, where he rented a small, sparse apartment in a red-brick duplex, from which he ran his first four political campaigns as a long shot for a third party called Liberty Union.

Sanders’ message back then? Exactly what it is now.

“In America, if we wanted to, we could wipe out economic hardship overnight,” he said in 1971.

“There is absolutely no rational reason why, in the United States of America today, we could not have full and total free medical care for all,” he said in 1972.

“This nation and this state of Vermont are owned and controlled by a handful of people who are using the wealth and productivity of this nation for their own selfish economic gain, and to hell with everyone else,” he said in 1973.

As he struggled to pay his bills in Burlington as an on-again, off-again carpenter and freelance writer — he was on unemployment for a few months in 1971, too — he traveled around the state in his rickety Volkswagen Beetle advocating for a higher minimum wage, unlimited unemployment compensation, heavy taxation on the most well-off people and companies and a radical redistribution of wealth.

He described big businesses bouncing from state to state for tax breaks as “corporate economic blackmail.” He proposed a ceiling on what any individual could make and keep. “Nobody should earn more than $1 million,” he told the Burlington Free Press. He even called for the legalization of hitchhiking. “Hitchhiking,” he explained, “is an important means of transportation for people who lack cars.”

“He was really concerned about the have-nots … and how their interests might be represented,” said Martha Abbott, who’s known Sanders since the ‘70s.

Clockwise: The home owned by the Sanderses in Burlington, Vt.; Sanders and his wife, Jane, in July 2015; and Bernie Sanders appearing on "Real Time with Bill Maher." | City of Burlington, Associated Press, HBO

Running for Liberty Union, twice for U.S. Senate, twice for governor, he never got more than 6 percent of the vote. But in late 1980 and early 1981, campaigning as an independent to be mayor, he walked the streets of the city’s poorest wards, cold, wet winter winds gusting up from Lake Champlain, and knocked on door after door of drafty wooden row houses, the Burlington equivalent of where he had grown up in Brooklyn. Alan Abbey watched. “And you could see the connection he made with them,” said Abbey, then a young City Hall reporter for the Free Press. “He came from the working class, and he understood the working class.”

In March of ’81, they voted him into office.

His salary, $33,800 a year plus a car stipend of $1,200, according to the Boston Globe, was by far the most money he had ever made.

“We’re coming in,” he said that month to a reporter from the New York Times, “with a definite class analysis and a belief that the trickle-down theory of economic growth, the ‘what’s good for General Motors is good for America’ theory, doesn’t work.”

In 1990, after he won a seat in the House of Representatives, he told the Times, “I know where I came from. I don’t need to get down on my knees and ask rich people for help.”

In 2006, before he won his seat in the Senate, he told the Washington Post, “I go out, I knock on doors, and I talk about economic justice and oligarchy and what’s fair …”

And now, running for president, gaining on Clinton, he’s suddenly filling basketball arenas by saying what he’s been saying for more than 40 years.

