Donald Trump has over $5 million in cash at Capital One Bank — bad idea

There is an awful lot going on in Donald Trump’s insanely long financial disclosure form, but one thing you see is that he’s taking some reckless risks with his basic cash.

Here’s the relevant part:

For one thing, $6 million to $30 million is just an awful lot of cash to be holding on to uninvested. Trump is rich and presumably can afford to be somewhat wasteful, but it seems a little odd. Then again, maybe this is just how rich guys roll.

The big problem here is that the FDIC insures the value of bank accounts at up to $250,000 per bank. That means if the bank fails, you get your money back. But if you have, say, $5 million in your bank account, then you could lose $4.5 million in a bank failure. Ouch!

So your smart play is to divide your assets across a whole series of accounts. Of course, this makes life more complicated than just banking with one bank. But Trump already has accounts with a whole bunch of banks. It couldn’t be that much trouble to open up a few more. At a minimum, he should try to spread his cash out evenly across the banks to minimize his risks.