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WILMINGTON, Del.—The purchase of an abandoned 10,000 square-foot DuPont mansion in an affluent Wilmington suburb may have been a stretch for a 32-year-old widower and father of two commuting daily to Washington for his job as a U.S. senator.
Then again, Joe Biden readily acknowledges that his passion for real estate occasionally overtook his common sense.
The son of a car salesman who was under frequent financial duress, Mr. Biden has seen up close what it looks like to scrape by. He also knows what it feels like to be worried about his mortgage payments.
As Mr. Biden faces a make-or-break moment for his presidential campaign Saturday in South Carolina, he has emphasized that background, trying to draw a contrast with primary rivals who include two billionaire businessmen.
The former vice president has cultivated a decadeslong brand as “Middle Class Joe” and often referred to himself as “one of the poorest members of Congress.” But Mr. Biden’s financial struggles, compared with many of his colleagues, weren’t just a product of his reliance on a government salary. They also stemmed from his penchant for buying stately houses, a Wall Street Journal review of public records and interviews with his current and former associates found.
Mr. Biden’s efforts to live like some of his wealthier Senate colleagues at times led him to borrow money against the value of his homes and life insurance policies, and he routinely reported a negative net worth.
Unlike many of his former colleagues who left office after a term or two and joined the private sector, Mr. Biden, 77 years old, served 44 years in office. After his vice presidency ended, he earned more than $15 million in two years from speeches, teaching positions and book deals.
“Money to him was to provide for his family, to have a nice house, to pay for his kids’ school,” said Ted Kaufman, a top aide to Mr. Biden starting with his 1972 Senate run who was appointed to Mr. Biden’s Senate seat when he became vice president.
Boyhood move to Wilmington
Scranton, Pa., the working-class town where Mr. Biden was born, figures prominently in his campaign speeches. “Look, I’m running because so many people are being left behind,” Mr. Biden said in the Las Vegas debate last week. “People I grew up with in Scranton—when my dad lost his job, lost his house—had to move.”
The family resettled in Wilmington by the time Mr. Biden was 10. The Delaware city showed the young Mr. Biden what real wealth looked like: New housing developments like the one his family moved to were filled with professionals at the DuPont chemical company, and its namesake founders and heirs had scattered their stately homes throughout the area.
Julie Bykowicz/The Wall Street Journal
Fresh out of law school, Mr. Biden established his spending pattern. He borrowed money to start a law practice and held office on the New Castle County Council while supporting his wife, Neilia, and their growing family.
Mr. Biden’s 2007 autobiography, “Promises to Keep,” chronicles his predisposition for real estate he could barely afford. By the time he and Neilia were ready to buy a house, he wrote, “I’d thought about houses quite a bit already. My idea of Saturday fun was to jump in the Corvette with Neilia and drive around the Wilmington area scouting open houses, houses for sale, land where we could build.”
“Even as a kid in high school I’d been seduced by real estate,” he wrote.
Mr. Kaufman recalled how Mr. Biden carried issues of Architectural Digest with him on his near-daily Amtrak commutes between Delaware and Washington and on campaign planes. “He’s interested in real estate the way I’m interested in the Philadelphia Eagles.”
By the time he was 28, Mr. Biden had purchased four different properties in quick succession, juggling a loan from his father-in-law and three mortgages at times. “I was in constant danger of falling behind,” he wrote in his book.
His first big commission as a lawyer paid him $5,000, he wrote in his autobiography. He cashed the check and bought a massive wooden desk, a dining set and a four-poster bed, spending “maybe more than the check” he had earned.
“A more practical young family might have played it safer,” Mr. Biden wrote. “But this was our adventure, and Neilia was so sure of our future.”
Julie Bykowicz/The Wall Street Journal
Mr. Biden bought a centuries-old Colonial home on North Star Road, which he could afford only after selling off his three other properties “in a hurry to raise cash for the down payment,” he wrote. The property came with a big political problem: It wasn’t in his council district. His solution was to move his parents into the grand new property and live in their home instead, he wrote.
The widowed senator
Mr. Biden’s surprise win of a U.S. Senate seat at age 29 in the fall of 1972 meant the end of his brief foray in the private sector. He sold his law firm to his law school friend, Jack Owens, who would later marry Mr. Biden’s sister, Valerie. The terms of the sale weren’t disclosed.
Mr. Biden’s wife and baby daughter died in a car crash in late 1972. A few years later, while on a Senate salary of $42,500, he sold the house on North Star and bought the DuPont mansion for $185,000. Financial advisers often suggest buyers shouldn’t pay more than 2½ times their annual income for a home, though many Americans do.
The house, dubbed “The Station,” served as Mr. Biden’s political hub for years, including during his short-lived 1988 presidential run. His aides saw him pump cash and time into keeping up the home and its grounds.
“Whatever he gets, the house eats for breakfast. That house loves cash,” Richard Ben Cramer wrote in the 1992 presidential campaign book “What It Takes.”
In 1996, Mr. Biden, by then married to Jill Biden and with a teenage daughter, sold The Station for his asking price, $1.2 million, to the then-vice chairman of credit-card company MBNA. Media analyses found the price was in line with other properties in the area.
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He bought 4 acres of lakefront property on nearby Barley Mill Road and built a house secluded from public view. While vice president, he rented out a cottage on the property to the Secret Service for $2,200 a month, government contract records show. He still owns it.
The family elder
Mr. Biden’s economic struggles are displayed in his years of personal financial-disclosure forms that show he frequently owed more money than he had in cash and assets. His wife has been a community-college instructor since 1993.
“My net worth was zero a couple of times,” Mr. Biden said at a debate this month in New Hampshire. “I’ve never focused on money for me.”
In 2007, his final year as a Delaware senator, the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics ranked Mr. Biden as the least wealthy senator.
Family issues added to the financial stress. In 2014, as his oldest son, Beau Biden, was suffering from terminal brain cancer, Mr. Biden told then-President Obama that he might need to take out a second mortgage on his house to help Beau’s family make ends meet.
Mr. Biden’s finances in his second-to-last year as vice president looked especially precarious. He reported between $291,000 and about $1 million in assets and income outside his vice-presidential salary of $230,700, and between $780,000 and about $1.6 million in liabilities, according to his 2016 personal financial disclosure form, the last one he filed in office. Leaving the government sparked a financial turnaround, subsequent financial documents show.
With their annual income now in the seven figures for the first time in their lives, the Bidens increased their charitable giving and started foundations. They also bought a $2.7 million beach house on the Delaware shore.
Speaking to voters Wednesday in Georgetown, S.C., Mr. Biden said that after leaving office and making more money, “I kept a commitment that I made to my wife who was raised on the Jersey Shore that one day we would have a place in Rehoboth Beach. I had no idea what the hell it cost! And so I was able to just, with the money we made, I was able to buy her a house.”
—Ken Thomas in Georgetown, S.C., and researcher Jim Oberman contributed to this article.
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