Convention organizers are eager to pay Mrs. Clinton, and, since leaving office in February, she has embarked on a packed schedule of events for groups like the American Society of Travel Agents and the National Association of Realtors. 
 
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 But joining what is known in Washington as the buckraking circuit carries risks for Mrs. Clinton, who prides herself on a long career in public office and could be diminished by the free-flowing money as she considers a run for president in 2016. 
 
 The senators who may face off against her in three years are barred from taking such honorariums. Past presidential candidates, including former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas, have drawn scrutiny for the practice; Mr. Huckabee memorably left the presidential campaign trail in 2008 to deliver an address in the Cayman Islands. “I’m not independently wealthy,” Mr. Huckabee said at the time. “I wish I was. I have to make a living.” 
 
 The events are also giving Mrs. Clinton large captive crowds as she considers a run for president. She shows a personal side, according to several people who have attended her speeches this summer. Along with reminisces about her mother, Dorothy Rodham, she gushes about her daughter, Chelsea, and tells the oft-shared story of the first time she heard her husband’s Southern drawl as he described “the size of watermelons in Arkansas.” 
 
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 But she does not shy away from policy. Last month, about 17,000 people filed into McCormick Place, a convention center in Chicago, where Mrs. Clinton, in prepared remarks, talked about health care changes, as well as border security and immigration. “I hope it’s heading to a new law that will resolve a lot of these issues,” she told the crowd. “It’s way overdue.” 
 
 She praised the human resource managers gathered for their conference. “You know what it takes to provide workers the flexibility and benefits that they need to care for their children,” she said. 
 
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 At a time when almost everything Mrs. Clinton publicly says feeds presidential speculation, she has also used the speeches to address issues like the Arab Spring, the conflict in Syria and the former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden. 
 
 Mrs. Clinton does not make her speechmaking schedule public, but the trade groups typically publicize the events. A spokesman for the former first lady declined to comment. 
 
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 But her political rivals have already started to keep tabs on her speaking schedule, looking for any hint of a conflict of interest. (So far, Mrs. Clinton’s staff appears to have carefully chosen where she has given speeches, avoiding paid talks to potentially controversial groups.) 
 
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 “We’re starting immediately to monitor both Hillary and the other Democratic rising stars and collect, tag and characterize their speeches so we can hold them accountable when the campaign begins in earnest,” said Tim Miller, the executive director of America Rising, a conservative political action committee. 
 
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 Mr. Miller said that it was too early to send operatives to covertly buy tickets to Mrs. Clinton’s speeches, but that the group was watching from a distance “to monitor whether she’s hobnobbing with investment bankers in New York City that might seem like favoritism down the line.” 
 
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 Since Mrs. Clinton stepped down as secretary of state, she has divided her time between writing a memoir and juggling a growing schedule of engagements, paid and unpaid. The unpaid appearances are typically focused on her advocacy work for women and girls as part of the Clinton Foundation, the charitable organization founded by her husband. (She is not completely avoiding politics, and will campaign for Terry McAuliffe, a family friend who is running for governor of Virginia.) 
 
 In Chicago, she also spoke to a sellout crowd at the Navy Pier to benefit Citizens United for Research in Epilepsy, the nonprofit group founded by Susan Axelrod, the wife of David Axelrod, a former top strategist for President Obama. 
 
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 Next month, Mrs. Clinton will speak at a meeting of the Global Business Travel Association in San Diego (a convention her husband addressed for $250,000 last June), and in the fall she will deliver speeches at the conference of the American Society of Travel Agents in Miami. 
 
 As a political image builder, of course, the paid speaking circuit is almost unrivaled, said Tad Devine, a Democratic consultant who advised Al Gore and John Kerry in their presidential campaigns. 
 
 “It’s a one-way street” that allows Mrs. Clinton to set her own terms, Mr. Devine said. “It’s the perfect opportunity to deliver a message of your choosing to who you want, to reach a broad audience and to get paid for it.” 
 
 A staff of seven working out of Mrs. Clinton’s small personal office on Connecticut Avenue in Washington balances her schedule. Aides include Huma Abedin, the wife of Anthony D. Weiner, who is running for mayor of New York, and Dan Schwerin, who has worked for Mrs. Clinton since 2005. 
 
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 Mrs. Clinton’s staff devotes much of its time to digging through giant binders of research assembled during her time at the State Department to help with her coming book, which is scheduled for release by Simon & Schuster next summer. 
 
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 A handful of trade groups — which do not endorse political candidates — started requesting Mrs. Clinton for their conferences even before she left office, said several of the executives involved in booking Mrs. Clinton. 
 
 The Harry Walker Agency represents both of the Clintons and other sought-after speakers like Kofi Annan and Dick Cheney. Don Walker, the president of the agency, did not respond to e-mailed requests for comment. 
 
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 Booking one of the country’s most in-demand public figures does not always work out. Last month, Mrs. Clinton had to cancel a speech at Pershing LLC’s Insite financial conference in Hollywood, Fla., when it fell on the same day as the funeral of Senator Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey, at which she delivered the eulogy. Pershing got former Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates instead. ||||| This post has been updated. 
 
 On Monday morning, ABC teased an interview between all-but-announced presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and the network's Diane Sawyer set to air later in the evening. 
 
 One particular exchange jumped out at us. Clinton says that she and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, left the White House in debt, and needed the speaking fees they both earned in order to pay those debts. 
 
 SAWYER: You've made five million making speeches? The president's made more than a hundred million dollars? CLINTON: Well, you have no reason to remember, but we came out of the White House not only dead broke but in debt. We had no money when we got there, and we struggled to piece together the resources for mortgages for houses, for Chelsea's education. You know, it was not easy. Bill has worked really hard and it's been amazing to me. He's worked very hard. First of all, we had to pay off all our debts. You know, you had to make double the money because of, obviously, taxes, and then pay off the debts and get us houses and take care of family members. 
 
 We also did not remember that, specifically. Clinton's opponents didn't seem inclined toward much sympathy, quickly lampooning it on Twitter. A specific target: Clinton's reference to the need to buy "houses," a comment reminiscent of John McCain's awkward failure in 2008 to remember how many homes he owned. 
 
 My favorite part of Hillary's "the struggle is real" interview is when she talks about paying for the family's "houses." Plural. — T. Becket Adams (@BecketAdams) June 9, 2014 
 
 And here are the houses, courtesy of the conservative group America Rising. 
 
 Certainly, the Clintons accrued an enormous amount in legal fees toward the end of the 1990s, but is Clinton's tacit suggestion that the family was scraping by accurate? 
 
 Well, not exactly. Clinton left the White House to head to the Capitol as New York's junior senator in 2000, meaning that she had to file annual disclosures of how much she and her husband earned, owned, and owed. We took a look at those filings, via Open Secrets. And this is what the Clinton's wealth looked like for the first four years after they left office in early 2001. 
 
 We considered three things: what the Clintons reported as income on their taxes, what they reported as assets in Hillary Clinton's mandated disclosures, and what was listed as being owed. The disclosures only give broad boundaries for the value of the assets owned, so the true value of their assets lies somewhere within the dark-red bar. 
 
 So, yes, it is technically true the Clintons left office in debt. But, a year later, the couple's assets had soared. And, as was reported at the time, the Clintons' debt was entirely gone by the end of 2004 — well before Hillary Clinton left the Senate and well before she left her position as secretary of state. Nor was that income entirely from speaking fees; Clinton's memoir Living History earned the couple a great deal of income, including $2.8 million reported in her 2001 financial disclosure. 
 
 What's more, there are perks that come with being a former president. According to an April report from the Congressional Research Service, Bill Clinton has received nearly $16 million in pensions and benefits from the federal government since leaving office. That includes $944,000 in fiscal year 2014 for office space, staff, and a pension. 
 
 If you were wondering, it was also not as though Hillary Clinton's unsuccessful 2008 bid for the presidency thrust the couple back into debt. For her 2009 disclosure, filed because of her appointment to lead the Department of State, the Clintons' assets were worth somewhere between $10 million and $50 million. 
 
 They did, however, have up to $65,000 in credit card debt. Clinton made $200, 000-plus for individual speeches in 2013, after she left the State Department. So that credit card debt probably didn't stick around long. ||||| Hillary Clinton defended the millions of dollars she and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, have earned giving paid speeches since leaving public office in an exclusive interview with ABC's Diane Sawyer ahead of Tuesday's release of her new memoir, "Hard Choices." 
 
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 "We came out of the White House not only dead broke, but in debt," Clinton told Sawyer, referring to the hefty legal fees incurred during their White House years. "We had no money when we got there, and we struggled to, you know, piece together the resources for mortgages, for houses, for Chelsea's education. You know, it was not easy." 
 
 She added, "Bill has worked really hard -- and it's been amazing to me -- he's worked very hard. First of all, we had to pay off all our debts, which was, you know, he had to make double the money because of obviously taxes and then pay off the debts and get us houses and take care of family members." 
 
 Much more of the interview with Hillary Clinton and ABC's Diane Sawyer will air during a one-hour ABC News primetime special tonight at 9 p.m. ET. ABC's Robin Roberts will follow up with Clinton's first live interview Tuesday, June 10, on "Good Morning America." 
 
 Hillary Clinton's Book Tour Takes Shape 
 
 Hillary Clinton Reveals 2016 Timetable 
 
 Hillary Clinton's individual speaking fees reportedly average $200,000 per appearance. 
 
 "Let me put it this way," Clinton told Sawyer. "I thought making speeches for money was a much better thing than getting connected with any one group or company as so many people who leave public life do." 
 
 Since leaving the State Department, Clinton has spoken before a wide-variety of businesses and trade groups -- from corporations like Goldman Sachs, to a scrap recycling conference in Las Vegas, to a group of Silicon Valley technology leaders. However, not all of the speaking appearances have been paid. For example, earlier this year, Clinton waived her fees and travel expenses to address the United Methodist Women Conference in Kentucky. 
 
 "I happen to have given lots of free speeches," Clinton added in the interview, which took place at her Washington, DC home.
– Another tidbit from Hillary Clinton's interview with Diane Sawyer: She and Bill were "dead broke" and seriously in debt when his presidency ended, ABC News reports. The debt came from "hefty legal fees," she said (likely due to Bill's "sexual harassment saga," quips the Daily News). "We had no money when we got there, and we struggled to, you know, piece together the resources for mortgages, for houses, for Chelsea's education," she said. "You know, it was not easy." Despite their income of $416,039, they were $11 million in debt and took on high-paid speaking gigs—with Hillary averaging $200,000 per, reports the New York Times. Conservatives are relishing the "not easy" part, considering the couple bought a $2.85 million residence in Washington and a $1.7 million house in New York state, and put Chelsea through top-notch universities (see a sample tweet here). But not all of their income came from speaking gigs, the Washington Post reports: Hillary's memoir Living History sold well, and Bill received almost $16 million in benefits and pensions from the federal government. Plus the gigs kept them from working as lobbyists, "as so many people who leave public life do," said Hillary. While she has given talks to high-flyers like Goldman Sachs and Silicon Valley tech leaders, she waived all costs to address the United Methodist Women Conference in Kentucky. "I happen to have given lots of free speeches," she added.