The humblest president in history: How Jimmy and Rosalynn returned to their Plains home after the White House

‘It just never had been my ambition to be rich,’ Jimmy Carter said in 2018

Jimmy Carter (left) pictured with his wife Rosalynn Carter (right) outside their Plains, Georgia home in 1988. The Carters lived in a home valued at just $167,000 after they left the White House, the Washington Post reports (AFP via Getty Images)

Jimmy Carter once held the highest office in the land — but was just as content in his family home in small town Georgia.

At the age of 56, having lost the 1980 election to Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter returned to Plains, Georgia, the small town where both he and his wife Rosalynn were born in the 1920s.

From the White House, they moved back into the ranch house they built in the city in 1961. That modest home is where Carter peacefully died on Sunday at the age of 100.

At the 2020 census, Plains, which to many is only known for being the birthplace of the Carters, had a population of 573. In 2022, the median household income was $36,138. 

The man Carter snatched the presidency from, Gerald Ford, was the first former president to take advantage of the plentiful opportunities to make money that now come easily to former occupants of the Oval Office. That wasn’t the way of the most humble president.

“Carter did the opposite,” presidential historian Michael Beschloss told The Washington Post in 2018. 

The couple spoke to the paper from the home of their friend Jill Stucky, and the former first couple ate salmon and broccoli casserole on paper plates. The then-94 year-old former president drank ice water from a plastic solo cup and a glass of a “bargain-brand chardonnay,” the paper noted. 

Jimmy Carter’s hometown of Plains, Georgia, pictured in 2023, is where he retired after leaving the White House in 1981 (AFP via Getty Images)

When Rosalynn Carter died in November 2023, grandson Jason Carter told The New York Times that she once brought Tupperware on a commercial plane and began making sandwiches for her family as well as other passengers.

“People were sitting there like, ‘Rosalynn Carter just made me this sandwich!’” he told the paper. “They couldn’t believe it. But she loved people. And she was a cool grandma. She was cool, like, she did tai chi with this sword.”

While former presidents often fly on private jets, the Carters flew commercial — more evidence they prefered the humble life, not one of post-presidency fame. On a flight from Washington, D.C., to Atlanta in the summer of 2017, Carter walked the aisle, greeting passengers.

Unlike other former presidents such as Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, Carter didn’t make tens of millions of dollars from the private sector.

He’s the only president in recent times, apart from former president Donald Trump, who returned to his before-presidency residence. While Trump returned to the glitzy Mar-a-Lago and, at times, Trump Tower, Carter went back to his two-bedroom ranch house assessed at $167,000.

Carter told The Post in 2018 that he didn’t want to “capitalize financially on being in the White House.”

“I don’t see anything wrong with it, I don’t blame other people for doing it,” he said at the time. “It just never had been my ambition to be rich.”

Carter’s White House communications director, Gerald Rafshoon, told The Post that “he doesn’t like big shots, and he doesn’t think he’s a big shot.”

Former Vermont Governor Howard Dean walks with Carter and Rosalynn at Carter’s home on January 18, 2004 in Plains, Georgia (Getty Images)

Carter was the longest-living president and had the longest post-presidency clocking in at more than four decades. But he also cost less for the U.S. taxpayers than any other ex-president.

According to the General Services Administration, the 2023 budget for Carter came in at $496,000, including his pension and miscellaneous expenses. The budgeted numbers for Bill Clinton, George W Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump were all over $1 million.

Similarly, Carter’s office cost less than any other ex-president’s. For instance, in 2018, at $115,000, his office — the Carter Center in Atlanta — cost less than half of his fellow ex-presidents’, with Obama’s costing $536,000, Clinton’s $518,000, George W Bush’s $497,000, and George HW Bush’s costing $286,000, the agency stated.

Joe and Jill Biden leave after visiting the Carters at their home in 2021 (AFP via Getty Images)

Carter could have built an office with living quarters in Atlanta, but he and Rosalynn stayed on a pullout couch for years before installing a Murphy bed.

Having only worked for the federal government for four years — his single White House term — and not the required five, he didn’t receive federal retirement health benefits. He said that he received health benefits via Emory University, where he taught for decades.

Carter returned to Plains after losing the 1980 election. His peanut business, held in a blind trust while he was in the White House, had a debt of $1 million, and he had to sell it.

“We thought we were going to lose everything,” Rosalynn told The Post.

Carter wanders through the crowd after a press conference where he talked about receiving the Noble Peace Prize on 11 October, 2002 in Plains (AFP via Getty Images)

Carter wrote 34 books, published between 1975 and 2018. They traced everything from his life and career to his faith, aging, fishing, woodworking and peace in the Middle East.

They never fetched as much money as books written by other presidents, but with a pension for former presidents at $230,000 last year, according to the federal government, the Carters lived without having to worry about their finances.

In 2018, Trump, a man who rarely misses an opportunity to brag about his wealth, was in the White House. At the time, Carter was asked if he thought a former president would ever live the humble way he did.

“I hope so,” the man from Georgia told The Post. “But I don’t know.”