Shaq's Financial Statement... Don't Believe Everything You Read

People are making a huge deal out of Shaq's financial statement, largely because the Average Joe can't possibly fathom spending the kind of money Shaq does. Let's examine what the financial statement sets forth:

$156,116 in mortgages on three homes
$31,299 in homeowners insurance
$3,345 in phone bills
$1,610 in lawn and pool maintenance
$12,775 in food
$1,495 in cable TV
$24,300 in gas
$6,730 in dry cleaning
$17,220 in clothing
$2,305 for pets
$110,505 in vacations.

We've got a financial statement that sets forth roughly $875,000 in monthly expenses. Do I believe that? Not for a second.

The financial statement that Shaq submitted yesterday was submitted to the court. He had to sign his name to it, and if Florida is like Maryland in this regard, which I imagine it is, he signed his name under penalty of perjury.

What everyone needs to understand is that the financial statement that Shaq submitted was for, among other purposes, calculating how much alimony he is going to have to pay to his wife. Any decent family law attorney (and if I'm a betting man, I'm betting that Shaq has a stable full of stellar family law attorneys) will tell their client of course not to fudge numbers, but to estimate high, and maybe to pick a recent month where you had an extraordinarily high number of expenditures and use those figures. Some amounts, like mortgages, are fixed. But the figure for vacations for example... yeah, that may be adjusted for the month Shaq flew first class around the world. What that will do is generate a financial statement that shows more expenses, and therefore less of an ability to pay alimony.

Shaq's wife's attorneys will have their crack at disproving the financial statement and showing that Shaq's expenditures aren't quite as high as Shaq says they are. I'm guessing that they'll have fun doing so.

So do I believe $875,000 a month? No. Do I still think Shaq spends many times in one month more than what I take home in salary? Yes.