How Pete Buttigieg Cashed In On His Candidacy

The transportation secretary gambled financially on both his political career and love life. It all paid off.

Before Pete Buttigieg announced he was running for president, he needed to do some math. The South Bend, Indiana mayor had run for office before—on a much smaller scale—and he knew how expensive it could be. There was the cost of the campaign, of course. But there was also the cost of giving up a day job and forfeiting wages. True to his consultant background, Buttigieg created a spreadsheet to run the numbers. “We could make it work, as long as we were very conservative,” his husband Chasten later explained in a memoir. “So it was decided: We were doing it.”

Smart move. Instead of costing Buttigieg money, the presidential run helped him earn gobs of it. Round-the-clock cable appearances made him famous, and fame led to money. Eventually, social media helped make Chasten a star too, which led to even more money. Over the course of the next two years, the Buttigiegs went from earning the sort of modest salaries you might expect from a middle-school teacher and a small-city mayor to hauling in more than $1 million, according to our calculations.

In the leadup to the election, they pumped out three books—one by Pete at the start of the race, another by Chasten toward the end, and a third by Pete in the closing days. Those works sold more than 150,000 copies, according to NPD BookScan, an industry data service. Then there were the university gigs. Chasten got one at Harvard, and after dropping out of the race, Pete started one at Notre Dame, which provided $37,000 in six months. Pete also became a podcast host with iHeartMedia, securing a minimum guaranteed payment of $150,000. At the close of 2020, he nabbed a cabinet nomination in the Biden administration, which led to a salary increase. As transportation secretary, he now earns more than $200,000 a year. Settled in D.C., he sold his house in South Bend three months ago for $310,000, more than double his initial investment.

Of course, the Buttigiegs have not held onto all of that cash. Aside from paying taxes and covering living expenses, they also had to pick up things like Chasten’s airfare for a portion of the campaign, part of an effort to steer clear of ethics concerns. But make no mistake: they still cashed in on the campaign. Today, Forbes figures that Pete and Chasten are worth at least $750,000, estimating conservatively.

Buttigieg Vs. Chao

Buttigieg is still nowhere near as rich as his predecessor at the transportation department, Elaine Chao, who is married to Senator Mitch McConnell.

By the standards of a couple fresh off of a presidential race, that’s not all that much. The 23 other top contenders in the 2020 election all came into the race sitting on at least $1 million, according to our calculations, and three had more than $1 billion. But if you know what the Buttigiegs were worth in the early days of the campaign, an estimated $100,000, their current holdings seem like a lot of money. And if you know their story before that—which involved Chasten sleeping in his car and Pete draining his savings to make a doomed bid for Indiana state treasurer—$750,000 seems like a fortune.

The basic outlines of Pete Buttigieg’s resume are well-known: Harvard undergrad, Rhodes scholar, McKinsey analyst, Afghanistan veteran, Indiana mayor. Less well-known are the financial difficulties he experienced along the way. At McKinsey, Buttigieg made good money, about $150,000 a year, working with clients that included a Canadian grocer, Best Buy, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan and the U.S. Postal Service. His job required him to be on the road during the week, so eventually he moved back home to South Bend.

In 2008, when the housing market was in upheaval, Buttigieg went to see a historic home about 500 feet from his parents’ abode. The place had good bones but bad features, including racoons in the attic, flooding in the basement and busted pipes all over. It had been vacant for almost two years, and a bank was trying to sell it off, dropping its asking price by a few thousand bucks every month. Eventually, the numbers fit into Buttigieg’s budget, and he bought it for $125,000, then tapped into his savings to fix it up. Friends often asked if he had ever watched a movie called “The Money Pit.”

Not long after, Buttigieg grew exhausted with his consulting job. He decided to mount a campaign for Indiana state treasurer, going against a Republican who had made a name for himself by challenging Barack Obama’s auto industry bailout. Buttigieg had saved enough money to make it a year without a day job. Still, from an investment perspective, running didn’t make much sense: Even if he won, his new job wouldn’t pay as much as his old one.

And that was only if he won, which he did not, leaving Buttigieg without much income, other than the $400 or so he earned as a Navy reservist every month. Despite the financial troubles, Buttigieg wanted to stay in politics. He started considering a run for mayor of his hometown, knowing that mounting a second bid for office would come with consequences. “Another campaign would wipe out what cash I had left and leave me reliant on credit card debt to keep going,” Buttigieg later explained in his book, Shortest Way Home. In 2011, while campaigning, he earned just $7,000.

This time, though, his gamble paid off. Buttigieg won, taking office Jan. 1, 2012. Back to earning a steady salary, his earnings hit $107,000 in 2012 and $116,000 in 2013, according to his tax returns. That fall, however, the Navy came calling, demanding his service overseas, beginning in February 2014.

Buttigieg tapped a trusted lieutenant to manage the city while he headed to Afghanistan, leaving a letter in his desk drawer in case he didn’t come back. His mission involved efforts to block drug funding for insurgents, but Buttigieg also kept tabs on his city from overseas, grabbing a cigar and laptop late at night to head up to the roof, where he would call into meetings via Skype. Despite the extra effort, he still took a pay cut while overseas, earning $46,000 in 2014.

Throughout his life, Buttigieg had grown accustomed to taking on multiple roles, but war changed his perspective. “Something about exposure to danger impresses upon you that a life is not only fragile but single, with one beginning and one end,” he explained in his memoir. “It heightens the desire for your life to make sense as a whole, not just from certain angles. And with this comes renewed pressure for internal contradictions to be resolved, one way or another. For me, that meant sudden urgency around a question that had lingered unanswered for all of adulthood: how to reconcile my professional life with the fact that I am gay.”

They met on a dating app, Chasten swiping from a gate at the O’Hare airport and Pete doing the same while recovering from a surgery. Both Midwesterners, they grew up in different circumstances. Pete’s parents both worked at Notre Dame. None of Chasten’s family members had ever graduated from college.

But he gave it a shot anyway, starting at a community college, where he began taking on student loans. Around the same time, he told his family he was gay, left the house and ended up sleeping at a friend’s place and, on some nights, in the backseat of his car.

Chasten transferred to the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, piling on more debt before failing out. He eventually enrolled at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, where he switched his focus from nursing to theater. The loans stuck with him. He worked a variety of jobs, at Eddie Bauer, a gay bar and a children’s theater. By 2011, despite everything going on, he was set to receive his degree about four-and-a-half years after starting college. Before graduation, though, he realized that he had forgotten to make up an exam he missed while visiting his cancer-stricken mom, leaving him barely short of a diploma.

He left without graduating and held onto his theater job, supplementing his income with shifts at Starbucks. Working from 8 in the morning to 10 at night, he was earning $19,000 a year—not nearly enough to pay off the $70,000 he owed. He transferred from a Wisconsin Starbucks to a Chicago one, where a man flashed some sort of knife on him one night, ending his interest in being a barista.

In 2014, about three years after he expected to graduate from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, Chasten finally got his degree by finishing an online class. He started substitute teaching in Chicago’s public schools and went back to get his master’s in education at DePaul. One day, he got sick and went to the emergency room. He didn’t have insurance. The bill for the one-night stay came to $12,000, adding to his debt load. By the time he was in his mid-twenties, Chasten owed roughly $100,000.

Stability came via a dating app, Hinge. He swiped on a profile that seemed intriguing and wound up going on a first date with Pete Buttigieg. Right away, Chasten told Pete that he was, in his words, “broke most of the time,” but he wasn’t completely up front about his financial troubles. Pete paid for most of the expenses, but when they went to the grocery store, Chasten sometimes acted like he could cover the bill, crossing his fingers that his credit card wouldn’t be declined. Chasten also kept a close eye on the mail, intercepting envelopes with collection notices before his partner could see them.

Until one day, when he missed one. Pete found it and walked into the living room, as Chasten recalled in his memoir. “You need to tell me what’s going on,” Pete said. Before Chasten responded, Pete cut in, “You need to let me help you.”

Help came in the form of—what else—a spreadsheet. “We spent the next few days figuring out who I owed, what I owed, and if it was negotiable,” Chasten later wrote. “He helped me make calls to the collections agencies and hospital billing departments. He also helped me come up with a budget so that I could manage my finances while still paying off the debt. Until I met Peter, no one had ever explained finances to me.”

They married in June 2018, making it clear to outsiders that their finances were intertwined. Three months later, they were already talking to their families about the possibility of Pete running for president.

From the outset, business was part of the calculation. On Jan. 5, 2019, Chasten quit his job as a teacher. Eighteen days later, Pete announced that he was forming an exploratory committee to run for president. Another 20 days after that, his memoir, Shortest Way Home, hit the shelves.

The book came with a $75,000 advance, a nice amount of money for a mayor earning about $110,000 a year. Even better: there was potential upside. According to his agreement, Buttigieg would receive 10% royalties on the first 5,000 hardcover sales, 12.5% on the next 5,000 and 15% on the remainder, plus 7.5% on all paperback sales.

The book supported the campaign, and the campaign supported the book—allowing Mayor Pete to make money as his candidacy took off. “My first sense that we weren’t in Indiana anymore came during Peter’s book tour for his memoir,” Chasten wrote in his own memoir. They went to a Washington, D.C. bookstore called Politics and Prose, where a crowd of people showed up to see Buttigieg. “I assumed the D.C. event was so popular because it was in D.C.—where politics are made (and destroyed). But lo and behold, Peter’s campaign started selling out events across the country, too.”

The excitement continued to build as Buttigieg closed in on a victory in the Iowa caucus (where he narrowly edged out Bernie Sanders, who had made his own fortune selling books during and after the 2016 campaign). According to NPD BookScan, Buttigieg ended up selling more than 90,000 copies of Shortest Way Home. That provided him with more than $400,000 in pre-tax earnings, according to our estimates. Representatives of the transportation secretary did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

After the campaign lost its momentum, and Buttigieg dropped out on March 1, 2020, more moneymaking opportunities appeared. Notre Dame brought him on as a faculty fellow in June 2020. Life away from the campaign trail also provided more time for relaxation. In July, the Buttigiegs bought a lakeside vacation home in Traverse City, Michigan for $415,000, taking out a $332,000 mortgage in the process.

In September, Pete became a podcast host. Chasten released his book, titled I Have Something To Tell You. It sold more than 20,000 copies, according to NPD BookScan. Pete wrote another book, Trust, that came out on Oct. 6, 2020—seven months after he dropped out of the race and one month before Election Day. Losing in the Democratic primary, it seems, offered him a chance to sneak in one more payday—and a large one, at that. On a financial disclosure report, Buttigieg listed $311,500 in advances from the book, with at least $100,000 more to come.

Joe Biden got in touch shortly after the election. The president-elect nominated Buttigieg to serve as his transportation secretary. In March, once the Buttigiegs were comfortable in D.C., they sold their home in South Bend, giving them one more windfall.