Maybe that seems like not a lot to the SV types, but it’s far, far more than what most people I know have to show for a lifetime of actually hard work.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/rich-bernie-sanders-210000864...
Or assume he had nothing until being elected to the senate in 2007, then started putting 60k/year into an S&P 500 index fund.
That also gets you to about $3 million.
Converting 2020 dollars (because times are weird right now) to 1960, it comes to about $35.50/month. On $500/month income, that's a 7% savings rate.
As far as I’ve heard, that money is from salary and book sales.
3 million isn’t exactly a lot of you live within your means and save.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/05/24/bernie-sa...
>Bernie Sanders one day left City Hall and found a ticket on the windshield of his rusty Volkswagen Dasher. The offense: This was the mayor’s spot, and, surely, a cop had thought, this was not the mayor’s car. But it was. It matched perfectly with both Sanders’ image as a scrappy advocate of the little guy and his own shaky financial reality. It was the beginning of the 1980s, and he was approaching 40, a single father of a not-quite-teenage son, renting a sparse second-floor apartment and having a hard time keeping up with his bills. “Not only,” he wrote on his yellow, coffee-splotched legal pads kept in archives at the University of Vermont, “do I not pay bills every month—‘What, every month?’—I am unable to …” His scribbles in barely legible cursive in the margins read like reminders and afterthoughts: “gas,” “light,” “water.”
He was, said Bruce Seifer, a friend of Sanders, an economic aide in his administration and one of many people who know him who told me this, “frugal.” Seifer paused and considered the right way to put it. “That’s a nice way of saying he’s a cheap son of a bitch.”