Bernie Sanders now has one thing in common with the millionaires and billionaires and other 1 percenters he so frequently attacked on the campaign trail: he now owns his very own summer home.
Vermont magazine Seven Days reported Tuesday that the 74-year-old senator and his wife, Jane Sanders, have purchased a four-bedroom house on the shore of Lake Champlain for roughly $600,000. Jane told Seven Days that they had recently sold a house in Maine that had belonged to her family since the 1900s, and used the proceeds to purchase the new property, which is located in North Hero (population 803, as of the 2010 census). With this purchase, Sanders now owns at least three houses, the others being in Burlington, VT, and Capitol Hill in D.C.
Sanders, an outspoken advocate for the working class who spent his 2016 presidential primary campaign railing against income inequality, remains one of the poorer members of Congress, and his net worth is among the lowest in the Senate. His 2014 tax returns revealed that he and Jane made $205,617 that year, the bulk of which came from Sanders’s $174,000 Senate salary. (Jane, who previously made about $160,000 a year as the president of Burlington College, retired in 2011.) Technically, Bernie’s salary places him in the top 4 percent of income earners, enough to purchase a nice lakefront retirement property with plenty leftover to buy “Feel the Bun” sandwiches from the local Hero’s Welcome General Store:
