During an interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel, Hillary Clinton began stepping away from her previous claim that she and President Bill Clinton were dead broke when they left the White House in 2001, but she still believes they were in tremendous debt.
Clinton had previously told Diane Sawyer, while promoting her book “Hard Choices,” that the family struggled to piece together resources to pay off mortgages for their multiple homes, as well as tuition dollars to pay for Chelsea’s Ivy League education.
“Well, when we came out of the White House, we were deeply in debt because of all the legal bills that we owed because of the relentless persecution of my husband and myself, and he had to work unbelievably hard to pay off every single penny of every debt we owed. And we did,” Clinton told Der Spiegel.
Hillary Clinton’s individual speaking fee has been reported an average $200,000 per appearance. Bill Clinton has made over $104 million for speeches and appearances since leaving office. The average income for an American household hovers around $51,017 per year in 2012.
When reminded of these facts during the Der Spiegel interview, Clinton responded that she recognizes how well off the family is, but that does not discount the struggles they faced.
“We are very grateful for where we are today. But if you were to go back and look at the amount of money that we owed, we couldn’t even get a mortgage on a house by ourselves. In our system he had to make double what he needed in order just to pay off the debt, and then to finance a house and continue to pay for our daughter’s education.”
Since leaving the State Department, Hillary Clinton has continued to earn money from a wide variety of speaking engagements with private companies and technological firms. The Clinton family’s net worth is estimated at over $100 million.