RPF0592-Widowed_With_12_Children_and_No_Life_Insurance
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00:00:15.200 | Welcome to Radical Personal Finance a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge
00:00:19.120 | skills insight and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while building a
00:00:24.080 | plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less. My name is Joshua I am your host and today I'm
00:00:28.640 | thrilled to bring you a special story from a friend of mine who we are sitting face to face
00:00:35.200 | her name is Anne and we're sitting here in her home and I've known Anne's story for a while it's
00:00:39.600 | been inspirational to me and I thought how better to bring you something really useful as far as
00:00:45.280 | a little bit of of her story and how better to bring what better what better way to bring you
00:00:51.120 | a story of unusual financial circumstances than the story of an older lady a widow with 12 children
00:00:58.320 | whose husband died when how old was your youngest at that time and 10 months so you had you had at
00:01:03.680 | that time you and he had 12 children and your youngest was 10 months your oldest was in her
00:01:09.120 | early 20s and he had no life insurance is that right that's correct and I thought this would
00:01:14.480 | just be a a great story and a very inspirational and encouraging story that I really wanted to
00:01:19.920 | share with my audience so now that I've given just a little bit of an introduction I would love to
00:01:23.840 | back up a little bit tell me the story of you and your husband how you met how you married and how
00:01:30.160 | you came to build a life together yeah that's kind of a long story let's see what I can do
00:01:34.560 | um I'll make it short uh there was 15 years difference in our ages and when I was uh going
00:01:46.240 | to the university um I uh now how do I do this let's see I was taking a chemistry class that
00:01:55.680 | was very difficult for me because I wasn't good at math right and um my chemistry partner was
00:02:01.760 | not any better than I was and he told me that I should get together with this guy named Jack
00:02:06.080 | because Jack could help me with the chemistry he didn't just wouldn't just help me with
00:02:10.960 | a particular problem that I had what would make me understand where the problem was and bring me up
00:02:16.720 | to date I thought no I didn't want to go through all that bother so I didn't meet Jack at that time
00:02:22.240 | but Jack is the one that I eventually married wow um and the way we met was at that my chemistry
00:02:29.200 | partners lab partner um had a going away party and both of us were invited to that party so um
00:02:37.440 | Jack offered to walk me home afterwards I thought oh yeah this is just a wolf you know
00:02:41.840 | but um he was a gentleman he didn't want to see me walking home at night alone and we got to
00:02:47.120 | talking about the chronicles of Narnia and we both liked them and so we started up a chronicles of
00:02:52.160 | Narnia study etc etc etc you can take it from there but we had a um uh we enjoyed each other
00:03:00.400 | we got to know each other over time both of us at that time were committed to staying single unless
00:03:05.760 | God made it evident that we should get married to the other person and God made it evident so when
00:03:11.600 | did you marry we married in 1975 okay and at that time you were living out here in the western
00:03:18.400 | United States and uh your husband was working as a chemist yes he yes he was an analytical chemist
00:03:25.760 | wow and one of the things that I find most interesting is as his career developed even
00:03:31.520 | prior to the days of of uh of computer connection he worked out the ability to work remotely how
00:03:38.720 | did that come to happen okay so we wanted to move from where we lived um he had developed some
00:03:45.120 | health problems he had high blood pressure and he was using okay so he's a scientist and he was
00:03:52.000 | using himself as a guinea pig to find out what was causing it he came to the conclusion that
00:03:57.840 | at least one thing that was um influencing his blood pressure was that he was chemically sensitive
00:04:04.960 | okay and we were living in a place he had built a house for us in a place that had chemical exposure
00:04:11.440 | okay and we couldn't get away from that in our house we tried internally like with indoor air
00:04:16.960 | pollution to get rid of all plastics and all scented products and things like that but we
00:04:21.840 | were still not able to get rid of the chemicals there so we decided to move somewhere where we
00:04:26.400 | could build another house and um have it be chemically clean and where there was clean water
00:04:32.800 | and clean air and um preferably where food could grow and we could grow clean food and I think jack
00:04:39.440 | had in the back of his mind to to um move the family to a place where food was growing in
00:04:45.840 | abundance because I think that he also thought well it may be that I'll die from this um high
00:04:52.400 | blood pressure and um so we moved to a place that was a friendlier climate for food growing and um
00:05:02.080 | boy there was a lot of food there was a lot extra that nobody wanted that was going to waste
00:05:06.880 | we'll get to that as the story progresses but I want to when did he become sick was he sick
00:05:11.680 | before you married or did his illnesses emerge after you married it was emerged afterwards in
00:05:17.680 | fact we probably it was um after we had four children so however however long that is and so
00:05:25.200 | did did you think that did it seem like um could could he pinpoint a specific cause or he just
00:05:30.640 | started to develop ill health well he found out that he had high blood pressure okay and he um it
00:05:35.600 | was he had a headache right and so he went and uh to a chiropractor who had helped him before to get
00:05:40.480 | rid of a headache right found out his blood pressure was high right so in in his research
00:05:47.120 | into his own symptoms he came to you came to understand that um the various environmental
00:05:53.200 | toxins were really causing him to to feel worse and have a lot of problems yes and so one of the
00:05:58.800 | solutions that there were the solution that you came up with was to move to a more rural area
00:06:04.480 | where you would be more able to build your own home and build it free of toxins which today is
00:06:10.320 | very in vogue today you can pay lots of money to have products that you know low voc paint and all
00:06:16.160 | kinds of things but this was during the mid 80s do i have my timing right early 80s probably yes
00:06:23.120 | so early to mid 80s but he didn't have a source of income in the new place he was depending on
00:06:28.880 | the other source of income right do you remember how he worked so this this is prior to the days
00:06:34.800 | of email this is prior to the days of i guess you had telephones faxes physical you know going for
00:06:42.000 | business and and letters right those are your major right methods of communication maybe you
00:06:46.720 | could overnight packages with fedex but it was you could it was certainly more expensive then
00:06:50.720 | than it is now to do that how did he approach his boss and how did those negotiations go to be able
00:06:57.840 | to do this yes well um jack was kind of peculiar in lots of ways right um one of those that he had
00:07:04.400 | been working full-time until we got married and then when we were expecting our first baby i'm
00:07:09.200 | backing up here when we were expecting our first baby um he went to half-time and the reason why
00:07:15.040 | he went to half-time work was because he was thinking where on earth is this child going to go
00:07:20.080 | to go to school right so he started researching and then began a christian school for the town
00:07:25.920 | where we were living really and by the time she was um five years old though to ready to go into
00:07:32.880 | the kindergarten that he had established uh he was thinking oh no homeschooling is the way to go
00:07:37.920 | this is the so he um he phased himself out of the christian school so that we could homeschool our
00:07:44.880 | children wow and um but then as time went on by the time we were living um away from the town
00:07:52.560 | where he was being supported he had gone to quarter time wow now i think that you know that's
00:07:58.320 | helped by um being paid a lot per hour because he had his doctorate in chemistry right and he could
00:08:07.280 | earn more money per hour but he wanted also to devote himself to one building shelter for us and
00:08:14.640 | two um teaching the children so most homeschooling families the mom is the teacher in ours jack was
00:08:21.520 | the primary teacher wow we had a deal that i would take the little kids until they were
00:08:26.080 | fluent readers and then he would take over the teaching there i can empathize with him because
00:08:31.280 | i don't i don't do well with uh the idea of teaching our our little ones so my wife seems
00:08:38.400 | to just i i work at it but she just seems to have a a bet an easier time with the patients now but i
00:08:45.760 | don't i don't think i'm okay with the idea of her doing all the schooling for the older ones because
00:08:49.840 | i get so excited about all my ideas i'm like i want to do the teaching and they get a little
00:08:54.320 | bit older but teaching to read is not doesn't so i think jack and i are probably alike in a lot of
00:08:58.800 | ways yeah well and he loved he loved being with the little ones too it's just that sure um one of
00:09:04.480 | my jobs was keeping the little guys out of the way while he was teaching the bigger kids right
00:09:09.040 | but you know there's a lot do you know that there's a lot of osmosis that goes on there that
00:09:12.880 | you're teaching the older kids and the little kids pick up on it oh yeah absolutely i think
00:09:16.240 | that's one of the best the best things that that can happen is is it seems to me
00:09:20.400 | segwaying into educational philosophy because so at this point me out maybe back up so you
00:09:27.440 | homeschooled many children for many years yes so you probably have seen all kinds of different
00:09:32.000 | traditions had all kinds of exposure but one of the things i wish more and more for is i wish for
00:09:37.120 | a less age segregated society so that the way that in my opinion the way that learning happens at
00:09:43.520 | least for me is i get exposed to something i get an idea and then you circle around and you get
00:09:46.960 | it better and better and over time you learn more and more so that's what the one room schoolhouse
00:09:51.440 | model kind of provided that it provided exposure and and older children could teach younger children
00:09:58.240 | some of the concepts and that would cement those concepts for them younger children could be
00:10:02.560 | exposed to things that older children were working on and they would start to peak interest to
00:10:07.200 | interests at different times right and i think it seems like the one room schoolhouse model is
00:10:12.320 | is a thing of the past with the exception of a homeschooling environment where you can have
00:10:16.560 | that older and younger structure so i can also if you leave your son to teach the younger ones the
00:10:22.480 | canadian provinces you come back and they're jiving it that's funny so i'll just point out
00:10:30.720 | for the sake of my audience because in jack's story there are some lessons that i are things
00:10:35.760 | that i frequently wish to impress upon my listeners and one of those is if you have
00:10:42.480 | developed your skills in the marketplace so that they are highly marketable then in in the equation
00:10:49.040 | of time you don't always have to keep working 60 hours a week if your if your hourly rate is much
00:10:53.920 | higher it provides you with opportunities to make some of these life changes as as jack did and we
00:10:59.760 | lived quite simply on that quarter time but why did you live simply from the beginning
00:11:07.920 | i think partly largely um i guess we didn't feel like it we needed to spend a lot of money on
00:11:17.440 | ourselves and jack liked to do everything himself he liked to start from scratch on things and um
00:11:23.360 | it made it so you could give more money away right so back so in that time period if that was late
00:11:30.320 | 70s early 80s you would have been involved kind of in the vanguard of of the homeschool revolution
00:11:35.680 | that happened in the united states was homeschooling legal when you started with your
00:11:38.640 | children well in our state it it was a moot point nobody knew and so jack was instrumental in helping
00:11:46.000 | that homeschool law to be written great well as a younger parent to an older i say thank you
00:11:50.800 | i've studied a little bit of the history of what many of you did during the 80s and we younger
00:11:57.040 | parents are very appreciative for relatively how easy we have it so so thank you for that
00:12:03.040 | so you guys went on and he built a house the house that you lived in and then found out about the
00:12:08.160 | toxins and so at that time uh you were moving so back to how we negotiated that with his employer
00:12:12.880 | he was already working a quarter time okay yes so um um he had also i don't know when that came in
00:12:20.560 | but he he felt bad about being on a salary uh because um when he didn't work very much
00:12:30.160 | then he'd still get a whole lot of money and when he worked a whole lot he didn't get very much
00:12:35.440 | money so he had negotiated that with his boss somewhere along the line there he did um that
00:12:41.920 | he would be paid on an hourly basis and so um he felt then the liberty to to spend more time
00:12:48.720 | building on the house sometimes and then when money was short he'd work a whole lot of chemistry
00:12:54.000 | work and so that worked out really well too um i think that his boss valued him and uh was willing
00:13:01.520 | to work with what he could do and jack was demonstrating that he could come down to be uh
00:13:08.640 | on site sometimes um when needed but otherwise there was a whole lot that he could do just he
00:13:14.480 | would travel back and forth from the more rural location to the more city location where the
00:13:18.720 | employer was right and the rest of the time phone calls faxes faxes were the packages
00:13:23.920 | and then we did get fedex a lot great great so when you moved to uh this rural location
00:13:29.840 | what was it that attracted you to this area beauty that we um there were various people
00:13:37.600 | that told us uh we would ask people that we'd meet who seemed to have similar views that we had
00:13:43.840 | what's the best place in the world and they would tell us various places and um so one time we
00:13:49.440 | decided to take a trip and look at some of those places and somewhere in between we found what we
00:13:54.160 | really liked and um it uh it has i'm going to go ahead and say it has mountains and it has water
00:14:01.840 | and it has um trees and it's beautiful right right and we're just being slightly cagey with the
00:14:08.000 | details just for your own benefit to avoid having any uh publicity which would be an annoyance to
00:14:13.920 | you uh our audience can figure that out but but you were telling me the story you and he were up
00:14:18.800 | here um you had five children and you're camping in the area and you're camping by a lake and you
00:14:24.320 | fell in love with the place but here you are you got five little children in a tent your tent blew
00:14:29.120 | blew down in the middle of the night there was a big storm that came up the tent blew down we had
00:14:33.360 | to dig our way out of the canvas you know to get to the van um and then the rain came down but uh
00:14:40.560 | yeah in the midst of all of that we still just loved it we just loved the the beauty of the
00:14:44.960 | place primarily so you bought the place as raw land forested mountainous land right right right
00:14:50.800 | and also that the area is like i said very fruitful right and so there's nothing there
00:14:56.000 | was nothing here no infrastructure uh when you moved here and so what did you do how did you
00:15:01.440 | develop the property the first thing that we did was um bring in power okay but to do that it um
00:15:09.520 | the power company wanted 20 feet of free space with no trees around it so that 20 foot swath
00:15:16.320 | down the hill took six weeks to clear chainsaws chainsaws two tractors there was a a woman who
00:15:23.280 | came to help and she was like six feet tall and very strong wow and with a big heart and she came
00:15:29.680 | and helped us wow and um it took quite a lot of doing also to dig the hole for the outhouse because
00:15:35.680 | there are a lot of rocks in this ground so that wasn't very practical of us if we wanted to be
00:15:40.480 | building um like having a garden and growing food to buy a hillside that had lots of rocks
00:15:46.800 | but um we loved the view so much that we went ahead did that and then uh over time jack built
00:15:53.280 | the soil up and made the flower bed you know the garden beds so it was about 10 acres right
00:15:58.800 | it was 10 acres 10 acres that you bought do you remember how much you paid for it
00:16:02.400 | yes it was um 15 000 for the 10 acres did you he paid for it you paid for it with savings that you
00:16:09.040 | guys had well that was how did you finance we sold the house okay where we had lived before that jack
00:16:14.080 | built now he when he built that house it was also he built it um we didn't go into debt for the land
00:16:20.080 | and we didn't go into debt as we built the house but we also didn't get to move into it very soon
00:16:24.480 | either right and then we also moved into it a little sooner than we might have it because we
00:16:29.200 | wanted to put all the money into that house so when we sold that house um we had enough money
00:16:35.520 | to make the move and to buy the land and to begin building the new house and i'll just say that um
00:16:42.400 | at partway through um my father said you know this easement trouble that you're having you
00:16:50.880 | ought to just buy the other lot that's next to you so that's another 10 acres so we ended up with 20
00:16:55.280 | acres so we had a little less money for building the house when it came to building the house bit
00:17:01.600 | by bit jack worked and worked and he hired somebody um there was a young man in the church who was
00:17:07.840 | just a brand new christian and um as was jack's custom he wanted to input in this guy's life and
00:17:17.760 | the guy was big and strong too so he hired him to work with him on the project and then they could
00:17:22.080 | visit as they worked right did you and he before you married did you talk about things like not
00:17:31.440 | borrowing money for houses or was this the kind of thing that emerged after you married um there
00:17:38.000 | were some things about jack that well a lot of things about jack that i liked a lot one of them
00:17:43.120 | was that i kept hearing rumors okay so he worked full time and he made quite a lot of money and um
00:17:49.920 | people he didn't tell me but other people told me that okay so this guy who was in the geology
00:17:55.600 | department um had a nice truck and it was because jack had bought the nice truck and then given it
00:18:01.600 | as a really good deal to this guy and there were just a lot of generous stories that i heard from
00:18:06.400 | other people so i knew that jack was a giver he he lived quite modestly and um i liked that i liked
00:18:13.920 | that about him that he um i guess didn't have a lot of toys so to speak and um his his hobbies were
00:18:26.160 | he loved fly fishing and hiking and things like that i just i liked the idea i guess i liked
00:18:32.640 | how simply he lived so i'll so so oh you asked did we talk about it when you were a how old
00:18:39.680 | were you when you married i was 21 and so he was then he was 36 right okay so when you were 21
00:18:46.240 | were um well let me give the background the reason i'm asking as a younger man to an older woman
00:18:52.640 | one of the challenges that i observe in marriage today is my wife my wife's generations
00:19:00.160 | generation many of our friends and many younger women are they've come from they've never known
00:19:07.280 | lack right now depending on the circumstances of course some people come from from lack some people
00:19:13.840 | have learned how to to um uh well many people come from difficult situations and my wife her you know
00:19:21.200 | she was raised by a single mom who had just a very small amount of money and so those lessons went
00:19:27.520 | deep within her and one of the things that i really appreciated about her and was attracted
00:19:31.680 | to that she was she was frugal she was she was not high maintenance she's not uh she's not high
00:19:37.680 | maintenance she doesn't require a lot she's not constantly frustrating with all the things that
00:19:42.240 | that she would like to have but a lot of um but i also have a lot of friends and many times their
00:19:47.360 | husbands uh you know when we're talking privately one of the things that's frustrating is how
00:19:52.240 | inflexible their wives are and one of the challenges for many husbands is how do i do
00:19:59.760 | some of the things that i'd like to do for our family that require sacrifice in the short term
00:20:05.360 | and it's a question i've thought a lot about and i've never quite known obvious known what to say
00:20:11.840 | other than be careful before you marry marry somebody who's not high maintenance marry somebody
00:20:16.640 | who's willing to to do that and then be willing to carefully share and work diligently to share
00:20:22.400 | over time a vision and to show how times of sacrifice are temporary but when i when i hear
00:20:29.200 | your story and when you uh talk about you know being young and and building a house moving into
00:20:35.280 | the house before it's finished uh and of course having five small children when your husband is
00:20:42.160 | building a house a cabin in the woods though that's hard it's it seems romantic when you read
00:20:47.680 | the book but they're here about it but it's a lot of hard sweaty days and a lot of crying
00:20:52.560 | children and a lot of penny pinching and a lot of going without nice things and it i guess i'm not
00:21:00.880 | i guess the the question i'm i'm wondering is did you were you went along with those and you went
00:21:06.960 | along with those ideas you went along with your husband in that was that something that he led
00:21:12.000 | you in after being married or were you always that kind of adventurous person that's a good question
00:21:18.000 | and i don't know how he would have known to evaluate me on that either um i know that as a
00:21:25.120 | girl i used to grow up i had a friend named claudia and we would play um brave pioneer woman
00:21:30.880 | and what that was was basically i dare you to do this because a brave pioneer woman would
00:21:36.080 | do this right and it was very stupid things that we did with each other but i kind of had that um
00:21:43.280 | that was kind of a something that i liked when i was in junior high was that idea of being a brave
00:21:48.560 | pioneer woman so um uh i think that sometimes people have looked at our lives and looked at
00:21:54.480 | like that we had so many children and looked at like sometimes um uh okay so one time there was
00:22:02.000 | a man who came to visit us when we lived in our log house we didn't have glass in the windows yet
00:22:06.800 | we didn't have a door yet we didn't you know and um and he said jack you're a rich man
00:22:13.600 | and he was looking at the family and um the the family riches that we had not it was obvious not
00:22:23.840 | what we had in our um like materially um but um i just want to say that jack uh and i did these
00:22:32.800 | things together it wasn't um it wasn't that he was leading me necessarily i mean he did lead me
00:22:40.880 | but he it wasn't that he pushed me or uh presumed on me like for things he he and i were in on it
00:22:48.400 | together and um one thing that goes into this is that uh jack with a strong christian slant was
00:22:57.760 | practically libertarian in his politics jack and i would have gotten along really well
00:23:03.440 | the more i learned about him i met him once when i was a kid but the more i learned about him we
00:23:07.280 | would have we would have talked for hours that's funny so um so but that extended to like he he
00:23:13.520 | hated to even pin up the goats that we had and the chickens that we had he'd like liberty liberty was
00:23:18.000 | so important to him and as his wife he was so um he was concerned with my liberty too so he was not
00:23:26.480 | pushing anything on me i remember when we were building the house in um that city place um he
00:23:34.960 | said you know if i'm going to be building this then i'm not going to be available to help with
00:23:39.280 | the children and that was when we had three children and um he said is it worth it is is
00:23:46.080 | that going to is that going to be something you can live with that i'm not going to be here to be
00:23:50.080 | helping with dishes or kids or you know a lot of this you're going to be on your own
00:23:54.880 | and i said okay well yeah i think it's worth it i don't it's that doesn't feel you know i don't
00:24:00.240 | that doesn't appeal to me but we're going to just have to remember that together as time goes on and
00:24:05.600 | it's hard then we'll just say yeah but remember we thought it was worth it so we were going to
00:24:09.840 | remind each other oh yeah it's worth it and it really was worth it but we did um count the cost
00:24:15.920 | before we started did you and jack hope to have a large family from the early years or how did
00:24:20.560 | that emerge we were we wanted to have children but we sure didn't think we were going to have
00:24:25.120 | as many as we did um i was just talking to your wife about this um earlier uh what happened was
00:24:33.120 | we had four pretty much in a row and um and then jack said you know you're bushed you're tired
00:24:39.760 | no more kids until you rest up right so um we were uh very careful to not have any more children for
00:24:49.520 | a time and then i went through a kind of a rebellion and it was a rebellion against the
00:24:55.680 | societal uh norms in the united states um and the the thing was that i was seeing just sex sex sex
00:25:04.000 | you know like as far as movies and advertising and things like that but not connected to children
00:25:12.080 | and um and not necessarily in marriage like marriage married people are so careful and um
00:25:19.360 | i liked the idea of um planting when it's time for something to grow and not using herbicide
00:25:28.720 | and pesticide and whatever to make things not grow right and so the idea of being fruitful
00:25:36.000 | kind of grew in my mind and i thought it would be a a pleasure to be fruitful and so that's
00:25:43.520 | i kind of went through that rebellion so then um after that then it was kind of a free-for-all
00:25:48.480 | except that we spaced the children too right well i can understand that with um the age of our
00:25:55.040 | children they're in my and i always had this theory that the hardest time is when you have
00:26:00.800 | multiple young ones but your oldest is not old enough to help i think that's true that most
00:26:05.120 | children i ever had was two or three i think right maybe four that was the most i ever had
00:26:09.760 | because after that i had help right right and that's uh i told my wife that from the very
00:26:14.800 | beginning i said i'm convinced that three is the hardest number because your oldest is not you're
00:26:21.120 | outnumbered and yet your oldest is basically still useless whereas beyond that uh your oldest can be
00:26:27.200 | more useful and can help you to work with the younger ones and and that's so valuable for them
00:26:32.480 | to help them develop character and be able to to grow as adults so when you moved um here to build
00:26:38.720 | the cabin you had how old was your oldest do you remember about yes when we moved here she was 12
00:26:46.320 | okay um and probably well when we when we were in the house i know we were in the house um
00:26:55.200 | and things were you know pretty civilized um then we had glass in the windows yet yes or at least
00:27:03.360 | this most of them we had plastic over some of them you know um here's a trick for people who
00:27:09.120 | are have plastic over their windows if you have cats put chicken wire over the plastic and then
00:27:13.120 | they can't scratch their way in good trick yeah it sounds from hard one experience that's right
00:27:18.560 | so um uh the oldest then was 14. okay okay so um now jack was not he he wasn't like he was a
00:27:27.520 | contractor no he was a he was a a self-taught man he was a uh he would learn himself so at that time
00:27:34.720 | he learned how to build from reading books asking questions right right right well and um the uh
00:27:42.160 | he had built a dog house before he built our house in in um the city and um the only class that ever
00:27:50.720 | got a dn was woodworking wow so um it was a challenge for him and another thing about him
00:27:56.240 | was that he um he tested out pretty strongly as a perfectionist at work right and then we did one
00:28:04.400 | for just as a couple and he was not nearly as perfectionistic so that was really a blessing
00:28:08.960 | for me because i'm not perfect right um but uh i loved it that he went ahead and um built and with
00:28:17.920 | a log house particularly everything is irregular you know um it's not dimensional logs and um
00:28:25.120 | he was willing to just do it and i encouraged him in it um and not worry about it not being perfect
00:28:35.920 | and that was that was great i i loved seeing that side of him right right to just go ahead
00:28:42.160 | well such a neat story and i think it should be more common than it is when you have somebody
00:28:47.280 | who is intensely intellectual um like a phd in chemistry and a working active research chemist
00:28:53.440 | i think it's often helpful to have an outlet for physical labor and be challenged and things that
00:28:59.440 | you're not you're not skilled in it's true and um i always noticed that my grandfather i don't know
00:29:05.280 | if you remember this but my grandfather was a chemist and he didn't have a phd i think he had
00:29:09.520 | a master's degree in chemistry but he taught chemistry for many years but he was also often
00:29:14.960 | working with things and i always felt like those two things go together really well to have an
00:29:20.000 | intensely intellectual pursuit and then also to have a chance to go out and work with something
00:29:24.880 | in your hands where it's where you have a chance for your body to work and your mind and he also
00:29:30.480 | found that so satisfying because with his chemistry he wasn't sure that he was actually benefiting
00:29:36.640 | mankind with it right um he had patents that had never been used and um he just didn't see that
00:29:43.280 | but when he would build a table we would eat on the table and when he built a house we lived in
00:29:47.680 | the house and when he planted you know seeds they would grow and we'd eat the things and that was
00:29:52.400 | very satisfying to him so did jack's health improve when you moved out here no so the in
00:29:58.800 | fact it got worse okay so the allergens the things the toxins didn't seem to have as direct an
00:30:04.320 | influence as you thought yeah maybe maybe that's right okay um and if um and i just don't think
00:30:13.600 | we were able to get away from everything even being out here that he would react to yes got it so um
00:30:21.280 | he um there came a point where his pattern had been that he would have um high blood pressure
00:30:31.360 | spikes that would last three days and then there'd be a time where it would just be normal high um
00:30:38.240 | and there came a point where uh instead of the three days it went five days and he said oops
00:30:44.960 | can't do this because when his blood pressure was super high he wasn't able to
00:30:49.840 | eat or sleep or think or anything so he went ahead and went on a high blood pressure medication then
00:30:56.560 | people have frowned at him about not going on high blood pressure medication before that but
00:31:00.640 | he was trying to see if he could did it help oh yes okay the the medication helped a lot okay um
00:31:07.200 | so so um so that so then um fast forward a number of years you living in the house built the house
00:31:16.320 | developing the land planting gardens and things but it's not a farm it's a you know we're in a
00:31:20.480 | mountainous rural place and um he was continuing to work as a chemist that whole time yes mostly
00:31:28.400 | um there he had been working for a mining company and then the mining um industry kind of tanked
00:31:34.960 | for a while so then he was involved in um environmental cleanup with some similar processes
00:31:42.880 | and um and then when money got uh tighter than that because he just didn't have that kind of work
00:31:50.080 | then he and the kids did lawn mowing wow and raking leaves and things like that any kind of
00:31:56.880 | jobs that would come up so by virtue of being out of debt though and having a paid-for house and
00:32:03.520 | the area we're in the area we were in has relatively low taxes and such even though he
00:32:08.720 | wasn't able to work in his high-paying occupation as a chemist he was still able to support the
00:32:13.360 | family with relatively manual labor is that yes yes except that we also had um opportunities in
00:32:20.080 | this area because things do grow here um it's easy to get free potatoes it's easy to get there are a
00:32:27.680 | lot of people who have fruit trees and they just have too much fruit and it's going to go to waste
00:32:32.800 | and so i went ahead and asked god to um alert me to food that was going to go to waste and i would
00:32:40.080 | i said my part will be i'll try really hard not to let it go to waste and so um by this time i
00:32:46.000 | knew how to to um can and freeze and dry things and so uh that also made it easy to live here
00:32:56.880 | what is your analysis as a mother of the cost of children you know there's a famous
00:33:02.240 | u.s department of uh camera which department was a famous government study that comes out and talks
00:33:06.880 | about how much each child costs and the range is something like 130 000 per year what's your
00:33:12.160 | perspective though as a mother of many as far as the costs of children okay somebody asked me this
00:33:18.800 | once and um and i was supposed to tell her specifically and i said you know it doesn't
00:33:24.320 | count we don't really count because um when we had our babies at home um so we didn't need to
00:33:30.480 | pay for hospital things and um another thing is that we really didn't go to the doctor very much
00:33:37.200 | and um and then also we uh had hand-me-downs people would give us clothes or else we would
00:33:44.800 | go to second-hand stores and get clothes um we just didn't do things traditionally
00:33:51.680 | that way so um i don't i have no idea but i know that at one point jack figured out
00:33:58.960 | with our um when we had a large family by this time probably i don't know i'm guessing maybe we
00:34:05.600 | had at least 10 children um he figured out that uh we were averaging 50 cents a meal per person
00:34:14.640 | okay wow so when we we thought about buying an apple he said and um an apple cost 50 cents
00:34:25.920 | right right there's definitely a different in the economies of scale when it comes to cooking
00:34:31.360 | for children there's you definitely i think embrace different recipes you embrace a different
00:34:36.560 | approach just to feed a lot of people healthfully versus uh versus a small number one of my grown
00:34:42.480 | daughters now who has children of her own said i used to think that we ate according to like
00:34:47.040 | healthful things now i realize we ate what was cheap and the great thing is those don't have
00:34:52.320 | to be opposed no no healthfully and inexpensively so jack died when he was 61 correct right now did
00:35:01.440 | did you and he know that he was going to die was he kind of okay yeah so when he went on his when
00:35:08.880 | he went on the blood pressure medication he found out that his kidneys were functioning half of what
00:35:13.680 | they should and um then later um when he um was working at a well actually he was going to go to
00:35:24.560 | cincinnati and work at a place where they did radioactive um they had radioactive materials
00:35:30.880 | there he had to take a short course to learn how to be safe in that place we also have to shave off
00:35:36.000 | his beard so that he could wear a mask right but um at that time he had to have a physical exam
00:35:43.040 | so that they would know what his baseline health was uh so that he couldn't sue them later for the
00:35:51.520 | damage that he'd received at the plant um and they at that time he learned that his kidneys were a
00:35:57.280 | quarter of uh functioning and the doctor then said uh you have um in three years you'll need
00:36:05.120 | dialysis in five years you'll need a transplant he said you're in great health except that you're
00:36:11.600 | going to die tomorrow right well if you know you're going to die at least you could be in
00:36:16.240 | good health until until that happens so he so you and he had an expectation that the the days could
00:36:23.200 | be short there was no yes clarity on timing but you had an expectation the days could be short
00:36:27.760 | yes what did you do we had already been doing all sorts of things diet things one of my girls
00:36:35.040 | wrote a thing about this and said um almost none of what we did medically was um conventional
00:36:44.320 | and so um what did we do we prayed uh and it looked like to us that we had been praying all
00:36:57.120 | along but as time went on we it was obvious that he was getting worse rather than better
00:37:03.200 | and that it looked like god was not going to answer our prayers to heal him
00:37:09.520 | and we considered dialysis and dialysis at that time if you were able to do the in-home dialysis
00:37:15.840 | which was not a good option for jack for other reasons um in-home dialysis uh would cost thirty
00:37:24.480 | thousand dollars a year he didn't make thirty thousand dollars a year and he was opposed to
00:37:33.040 | okay so here it comes political things again he didn't like that um the government was involved
00:37:39.680 | in certain aspect uh aspects of our life so medical care is one and he didn't want to take
00:37:47.120 | from people like the money that had been taken involuntarily from people he did not want to use
00:37:52.000 | that for himself for medical things so he didn't want to use a governmental um health plan like
00:37:59.280 | medicaid right and he didn't we didn't have the money um so uh and he was not willing to enter
00:38:07.600 | into that and jeopardize the house and the land he wanted that family to be um if he was going to die
00:38:15.040 | and it looked like he was going to die soon then he didn't want to take make the the go into debt
00:38:21.680 | for that right um and he was firmly convinced that god could heal him if he wanted to so he assumed
00:38:26.880 | that this was his time to die if these other things were not in place i did ask him um what
00:38:32.720 | because five people offered him their kidneys for a transplant and he um he wasn't willing to do
00:38:40.880 | that because it was going to again cost a lot and i said well jack okay so what if there was somebody
00:38:45.360 | who was super rich and they really wanted to donate this money to you and they wouldn't miss
00:38:50.160 | it for a transplant what would you think then he said well if that were the case then i'd need to
00:38:55.920 | consider it i'd need to think about it but now i don't even need to think about it right did um
00:39:04.480 | did you did did you and jack consider having private health insurance was he opposed to
00:39:10.480 | private health insurance or no not private would have been fine and um we had been part of a health
00:39:16.720 | care sharing ministry before wow and so you go way back right yeah but then um it wasn't until
00:39:24.080 | after he died that i became part of a health care sharing ministry now with the kids and myself
00:39:30.160 | right but when you um when jack died he didn't have any life insurance he had no insurance was
00:39:37.360 | that something intentional what was did you did he think about did you guys ever think about having
00:39:42.320 | life insurance um at one point i asked jack so this is going to be kind of from the side on that
00:39:49.600 | question but at one point i asked jack you know all these people financial counselors say you
00:39:54.000 | ought to have savings right you know maybe we should be having a savings thing jack and he said
00:39:58.800 | and we're never going to need money more than we need it right now that's the challenge so um uh
00:40:05.520 | no he we he um we didn't have money in the bank to speak of and we didn't have life insurance i
00:40:13.200 | don't know that he was opposed to that yeah well one time he probably wouldn't have qualified you
00:40:18.400 | know once once he started to develop those types of symptoms he hardly would have qualified for
00:40:22.480 | life insurance anyway so i can set your mind at ease yeah no that just but as a long time
00:40:26.000 | seller of life insurance it's always i'm always interested to learn you know okay but we did have
00:40:31.600 | somebody who was presenting a life insurance policy to us right and when he found out that
00:40:36.320 | we really hadn't been to doctors to speak of he said oh i might be able to give you get you
00:40:42.080 | life insurance you know because there's nothing on record that shows that you have right but we
00:40:47.200 | didn't want to do that and we didn't have money for that right absolutely so um you know you make
00:40:53.680 | choices yeah and then you live with those choices that you make and i i would guess if jack were
00:40:59.840 | sitting here i mean do you think he would regret anything obviously he was a man of conviction
00:41:04.000 | and he lived through his convictions right and i i appreciate that i mean that's one of the things
00:41:08.720 | that i think we've lost an appreciation for obviously we all have to consider our own path
00:41:14.560 | and we have to walk in faith and we're all accountable for our decisions we're accountable
00:41:19.520 | to ourselves we're accountable to the lord we're accountable to our family for and each of us has
00:41:24.640 | to make the decisions but i appreciate um people who are clear on their their convictions their
00:41:32.480 | conscience and who walk up rightly um without sacrificing those things and i i really appreciate
00:41:38.640 | that i thought of one more thing there was a chart that i saw and i showed it to jack and it was
00:41:45.280 | talking about um the outcome like if you have a kidney transplant and it was showing um
00:41:51.840 | it was a graph and it showed how long people lived after a kidney transplant right what the
00:42:00.880 | statistics were and if you had one early on before your kidneys were too bad you had a lot better
00:42:08.000 | chance of it lasting for quite a long time but on this chart they had cut out all the people who
00:42:13.440 | died in the first six weeks after the transplant and they had cut out all the people who had who
00:42:18.000 | were diabetic also so that they weren't part of this study right and um still the um rate of death
00:42:27.440 | over not very many years was high right people didn't live a long time even though they'd had
00:42:34.400 | not i mean sometimes it does work but this you know um it didn't look good right on there and
00:42:40.800 | jack was just looking at diminishing returns like you go into terrific debt and no time to pay it
00:42:47.120 | off and maybe not live that long anyway and beyond um immune suppressants yeah so yeah dealing with
00:42:58.400 | medical decisions and when you are an intelligent person and you're able to look and to consider
00:43:06.160 | the medical wisdom for a certain condition you're able to consider medical treatments you're able
00:43:13.360 | to look at it and you consider conventional medicine um approaches you consider the outcome
00:43:19.040 | you consider unconventional medicine approaches it's challenging um because and it's especially
00:43:24.640 | challenging when you when you have faith in god and his hand in your life because every decision
00:43:32.560 | has to be measured in in that context and then when you look carefully at the numbers and you
00:43:38.320 | look carefully at okay what's the percentage of this happening of this treatment providing i think
00:43:43.120 | almost anybody has a place at which you know certain percentages chances of success and unless
00:43:49.200 | you unless your entire operating mindset is the only thing that matters is how many days i live
00:43:54.800 | on the earth we all have to look at the data and then seek to make a decision in light of it and
00:44:00.240 | and one of the things that's most difficult and i appreciate i'm seeking i'm trying to be
00:44:03.840 | straightforward on the discussion because i think it's worth having but one of the things that's so
00:44:09.600 | challenging is in hindsight um when you know the outcome right you know the outcome jack's dead
00:44:15.920 | when you know the outcome of a situation and now my parents went through this with my own family
00:44:20.240 | when my sister died and and then all of a sudden um you are standing there and you have to give an
00:44:25.600 | accounting of everything that you have done of the medical advice that you have sought of the
00:44:29.520 | treatments you've gotten and especially when you bring in religion uh especially those of us who
00:44:34.400 | may tend more towards kind of a fundamentalist type of of expression or what people would label
00:44:39.600 | fundamentalism that has a different um connotation or different denotation depending on you know
00:44:44.320 | who's using the term but there are some there are a lot of people who are just um i would say
00:44:50.240 | there are some people who i would say are um irresponsible right and i and um and so we want
00:44:58.240 | to be very careful not to be irresponsible but there's also different ways of understanding
00:45:04.960 | the meaning of responsibility and that's what's so frustrating especially this question we're
00:45:09.360 | dealing with some pretty heavy stuff because all of us with our children with our own decisions
00:45:14.000 | with our family members we must be responsible we must understand but as you say i mean jack was not
00:45:19.600 | a stupid man right so so here's something that jack had to deal with early on in his life and
00:45:25.280 | this is before i knew him um he had to decide uh he was very bright and he had to decide uh
00:45:34.640 | what am i gonna live for right and um he decided that he would not try to be a great chemist he
00:45:43.200 | would try to be a good chemist but to be a great chemist he would need to devote himself to that
00:45:48.960 | and he wanted to devote himself to jesus christ there was a point in his life where he realized
00:45:55.520 | that he was known for his political views rather than for his beliefs and he changed that too so
00:46:01.120 | that he didn't um he still had those political beliefs but he didn't tout them as much he didn't
00:46:08.560 | um that wasn't the lion's share of his attention um and in his life with us he could have made a
00:46:16.720 | lot of money and he would have had money to be having life insurance and all that but we wouldn't
00:46:21.600 | have had him right he wouldn't have been around for the kids and for me for me right so i really
00:46:28.400 | actually i really appreciate the choices that he made um i just talked with my sister not long ago
00:46:35.920 | and she was really angry with jack because he um deserted us he left us by dying by dying right and
00:46:44.160 | he didn't pursue he was selfish he should have done everything he should have taken care of the
00:46:48.560 | medical uh he should have pursued the medical things that we have now in modern medicine that
00:46:54.720 | can help somebody who has kidney trouble to survive and um so um that was one night that
00:47:02.080 | she was really she said i'm just still mad at him and the next morning i said okay so would you be
00:47:08.000 | willing to hear some of our thoughts about that and how we came to that decision and she said yes
00:47:15.840 | and so we talked and afterwards she said well i'm not so mad at him anymore but i still disagree with
00:47:21.280 | some of the choices he made and i think that that's a legitimate thing everybody has to make choices
00:47:27.200 | yeah i think we all have probably most of us would look back at some of our choices and and um
00:47:33.040 | we make the best choices we know at the time the information we have the decision making is
00:47:38.320 | is not easy and um you know my i was talking with a client of mine the other day and we're talking
00:47:43.760 | about choices and the problem with hard choices is hard joy the hardest the easy choices are
00:47:52.160 | the easiest choices are always when you have a good option and a lot of bad options those are
00:47:58.640 | always easy to know the hardest choices are either when you have no good option or you have
00:48:05.120 | several good options because choosing among no good options is really hard or choosing among
00:48:09.920 | several good options is very hard and unfortunately in hindsight it's one thing to look and to say
00:48:17.200 | hey you know we may would have made different choice but you may have different information
00:48:20.560 | which now shows hey certainly is different in 2018 the medical treatment for kidney disease
00:48:26.320 | may be very different than it was in 1986 or 1996 or 98 or 88 so i want to go back now to
00:48:32.240 | the finances and thank you for being willing to talk about i think these are the kinds of
00:48:35.920 | decisions and discussions that we wrestle with and all we all have to wrestle with um but i
00:48:41.600 | appreciate your your being willing to talk about them so um you've told me that before jack died
00:48:47.440 | he he he had a sense that he wasn't sure how much longer it was going to be and he called your
00:48:52.000 | family together for a family meeting right tell me about that so um he this was for the older kids
00:48:58.560 | primarily i don't know if the little kids were involved at all but he talked to the older kids
00:49:03.280 | and he said um okay so you guys this is what it takes to uh support our family in lean times
00:49:13.920 | and uh you just now heard my oldest daughter say he said that uh two people working minimum wage
00:49:23.440 | would support our family so my daughters two of my daughters said daddy we'd like to take that
00:49:31.120 | job on we would like to work and support the family when you die this was a your eldest was 24
00:49:38.400 | or 23 or 24 and then your second one this was not this was your fourth daughter right
00:49:42.800 | how old was she at the time about 19 or 20 or so yeah i guess okay and you had two other children
00:49:48.800 | in between but they had school and so they said dad we would like to do this one was sick yeah
00:49:52.880 | right um right so they said that they would like to do that that they would do support the family
00:49:58.240 | and so he was contented with that he was happy about that great and uh so that was the plan
00:50:07.920 | and things changed though so he died he died your daughters then did go to go and get jobs and do
00:50:14.480 | that or what they did they did now they they didn't know they they both were working one was
00:50:19.600 | working for a christian school and one was working for a christian like adventure camp thing and so
00:50:25.120 | they they weren't very high paying jobs so they didn't know if they needed they needed to quit
00:50:29.680 | those jobs and get other jobs but um it worked out fine because what happened was uh right after jack
00:50:40.000 | died when our friends heard that he had died uh so many people sent money to us just and i have
00:50:48.240 | this form that i'm going to share with you later but um so many people sent money to us and then
00:50:53.680 | after that um monthly there were some people who supported us every month they would send money to
00:51:00.560 | us and um they just committed to that blessing it was and some of them i didn't even know and
00:51:07.360 | one of the churches i'd never been to and didn't know those people but they supported us too and
00:51:13.200 | um and it one time jessica my oldest who was one of the people supporting us um came home to visit
00:51:20.480 | and she said oh you guys are eating or drinking orange juice you guys are you know i think i'll
00:51:27.840 | go ahead and buy some shampoo she had really been um living very frugally so that she could give me
00:51:36.800 | all the money wow so did uh did you didn't say that you know jack was some kind of public preacher
00:51:48.080 | it wasn't like you guys had developed a family ministries and established a company and going
00:51:53.520 | all around trying to to gin up support for yourselves he was just living his life or
00:51:59.680 | laboring in his family but somehow when he died um these people felt the the desire and the burden to
00:52:06.640 | to support you okay so yes that's true and and i'll just say too that um okay so our oldest
00:52:13.440 | daughter just a minute our oldest daughter um was very physically active and socially active
00:52:23.520 | and wanted to do everything and so um jack kept um supplying her with things so that there were
00:52:31.280 | there was a homeschool uh teen group that he formed and there was a track meet that they
00:52:36.720 | started and there was eventually it ended up being a thing that uh uh he did statewide for
00:52:43.680 | all the homeschoolers which was um athletics arts and academics um competitions and prizes
00:52:50.960 | and judging and um so he was well known that way and uh he had also uh taught chemistry for the
00:53:00.800 | local christian school for the high school there in fact when he was dying he was he just had very
00:53:06.960 | little energy um he was cutting things out and one of the things i suggested that he cut out was
00:53:13.120 | teaching that chemistry lab here at our our place and he said oh no that energizes me right now i'm
00:53:19.920 | gonna keep doing that so you accounted that when people heard that jack had died and you of course
00:53:26.240 | were widowed with 12 children oldest 23 or 4 youngest under a year so eight minors yeah so um
00:53:34.720 | so then you said that people sent money um totaling thousands of dollars yes um and so
00:53:42.320 | what did you do what did you do with the money okay so um i think this is where i'm going to
00:53:47.840 | tell i'm going to read this um paper to you um my oldest uh minor um okay so she was a senior when
00:53:58.560 | jack died in our homeschool and uh she wanted to go to college but um wasn't emotionally ready for
00:54:08.960 | that i don't think it's an easy thing to lose your daddy and um and so she took a second senior year
00:54:16.720 | going to our local christian school and then she wanted to go to wheaton college and uh academically
00:54:25.600 | she was qualified for that um so we applied for the financial scholarship and uh the form came
00:54:35.680 | for me to fill out and uh there was there was no blank on there for me to say where my income what
00:54:43.120 | my income was so i had to put zero on it so they sent me another form and i still had to put zero
00:54:48.400 | they had blanked out the places where i might be able to say something so finally they sent me this
00:54:52.800 | form this is verification of low parent income it says since the income which you represent
00:55:00.880 | reported for 2001 appears unusually low we must verify the information before making a decision
00:55:07.200 | on financial assistance for your son or daughter please answer the questions below giving as much
00:55:12.240 | detailed information as possible so there are six questions one what was your family monthly cost of
00:55:18.720 | housing in 2001 we own uh oh i said 106 dollars prorated property tax so hold on a second so the
00:55:27.200 | question is what was your monthly monthly cost of housing and your answer is 106 dollars which is the
00:55:33.520 | the prorated monthly property tax right right um and i said we own our own home and land
00:55:42.080 | from what income source was this paid gifts my two daughters seven families and two churches gave us
00:55:50.880 | monthly money our monthly income averaged about two thousand four hundred dollars what was the
00:55:57.520 | monthly cost of utilities in 2001 about four hundred dollars i said we have wood heat and that
00:56:04.640 | helps from what income source were utilities costs paid gifts see above many people did work to bring
00:56:12.560 | and ready wood for our heating so we paid nothing for that what was the approximate monthly cost of
00:56:22.000 | food in 2001 about three hundred dollars this includes detergent and others costs uh from what
00:56:30.560 | income source were food costs paid we were given a pickup load of food 800 pounds of potatoes gift
00:56:38.640 | certificates for groceries much frozen and canned and fresh food and a half of beef etc our grocery
00:56:46.000 | bill was low because of this what was the monthly cost of transportation in 2001 about 365 dollars
00:56:54.640 | it may have been more averaging out for tires and repairs we own our vehicles from what income
00:57:00.880 | source were transportation costs paid we paid this with gift money the mechanic also gave us discounts
00:57:07.360 | did you or your son or daughter receive any other support that was not reported on the
00:57:13.280 | FAFSA Wheaton College financial aid application or verification worksheet
00:57:18.480 | gifts see above also when my husband first died November 2000 there was a great inflow of money
00:57:26.240 | that was not monthly this came from many people in 2001 we received more than 15 000 from approximately
00:57:34.480 | 45 people or groups who were not the ones who gave to us monthly i used that money to help
00:57:40.320 | finish our house and for permanent improvements to our place and that's the end of that so that
00:57:46.160 | was i made this out June 3rd 2002. Wow what a blessing i appreciate being i appreciate people's
00:57:57.920 | sensitivity to when you know of a need to go and to give money towards it and it's neat to hear
00:58:05.360 | just the testimony of God's faithfulness i would imagine although you may look back on it and
00:58:12.800 | perhaps some of the the fear and the uncertainty may have faded by now but i would imagine that
00:58:18.560 | as a newly widowed mother there was a lot on your shoulders and there was a before jack died i took
00:58:26.640 | a walk and i talked heart to heart with God and i said um okay so father you know that jack is
00:58:36.400 | the organized person in the family he's the one who's the good the teacher he's the one who makes
00:58:41.120 | the money he's the one who um is practical uh if you take him you know what you're going to be left
00:58:48.880 | with that's me do you want to do this and um and then i i asked him for several things one i asked
00:58:59.440 | him for uh his name not to be besmirched because of our decisions and our choices and i also asked
00:59:07.680 | him if he would make it so that my family didn't have to be involved in our provision right because
00:59:14.080 | i knew that that would not be a good testimony uh because we were putting our trust in God right and
00:59:21.840 | they thought we were being kind of stupid to do that right um and he answered those prayers
00:59:28.400 | yeah no it wasn't easy emotionally emotionally mostly you know and just because i didn't want
00:59:36.640 | to be responsible well you got a chance to to uh to learn so did you continue homeschooling
00:59:45.760 | at that time yes yes yes and and i found out about um the widow let's see what is it called
00:59:53.120 | um the widow's curriculum fund which is through the homeschool legal defense hslda yeah um and they
01:00:04.720 | if you want to continue homeschooling and you're a widow um then um you can tell them what you would
01:00:14.560 | like to get for your curriculum and if that's something that they think is legit and um you
01:00:23.840 | have a need then they supply that so they supplied me with curriculum for years and years there came
01:00:31.840 | a time and this was so much this was really a cool thing because they had been so generous and
01:00:37.120 | you know i i didn't think that um i didn't think that it was that big a deal to me except that
01:00:45.680 | every time i received the check to pay for those things i cried because it was such a sweet thing
01:00:52.400 | and that's um they said they supply that money because um people give to that fund um but uh
01:01:02.160 | there came a point where i didn't know i had my last child at home and um my finances were changing
01:01:08.720 | and um i didn't know where i stood and so i applied for the curriculum fund widow's curriculum fund
01:01:16.960 | and they said you know um you uh are have enough money now that we won't support you and that was
01:01:25.120 | such a blessing to me too right when she said that i said oh i have enough money now i don't have to
01:01:29.360 | worry about this right right so that was really a sweet thing what a blessing did you ever um
01:01:35.840 | apply for any government uh assistant programs okay that's an interesting thing too um
01:01:43.120 | so jack didn't like social social security right right and um so uh
01:01:49.760 | jack didn't like no he didn't like social security and so one time he even wrote the
01:01:56.800 | social security number uh office the uh administration a letter saying uh i'd like
01:02:06.880 | to opt out of this now you can keep all the money i've put in right but i don't want to participate
01:02:11.440 | in this anymore and i won't read i won't expect anything and they said well no this isn't a
01:02:16.480 | voluntary program and he said yeah yeah i guess i knew that right right um but um when um okay so i
01:02:27.120 | i i talked about what happened um for that first year after jack died after that my parents um
01:02:34.800 | were in an unhappy situation where my father needed um more care than my mother could give him
01:02:42.160 | and so i asked if mom uh wanted to move up with him to our place and i'd help her take care of him
01:02:50.400 | well she financed building a little place on to our big house and um they decided then to
01:02:59.680 | so they financed the house and then instead of paying money to the retirement center they gave
01:03:06.080 | us the money that they would that they were paying for their housing and stuff yeah it was great
01:03:10.320 | because we could live on that it's fine right um so um after uh i forgot where i was going you were
01:03:19.840 | talking about government programs oh yes yes so after after my mother moved in my siblings and i
01:03:25.920 | got together and they were uneasy because i didn't have um health insurance and they said and i just
01:03:33.760 | want to say that my siblings are the greatest they're just wonderful and they're not greedy
01:03:38.080 | people but they were concerned that my mom then would be in a position of wanting to pay for any
01:03:43.280 | medical costs that we might have so they said we want you to get some sort of medical insurance
01:03:48.880 | and that's when i went on the um the health care sharing program that's not insurance but it's
01:03:55.440 | something i felt fine about doing and um and they said we also want you to take social security for
01:04:01.600 | the children that's available for you you ought to be taking it and i i said oh you know i'll
01:04:08.640 | seriously consider that let me clarify what they want you to take was the widow and orphans benefit
01:04:13.760 | from social security which is available to any minor of minor child of somebody who has died
01:04:20.640 | while enrolled while fully accredited accredited in the social security program right right so um
01:04:27.200 | i i had reservations about that but i thought okay if jack had the opportunity to go and take
01:04:34.000 | out all that he put in um to the social security administration then he would have liked to take
01:04:41.200 | so i i i didn't know how that would work but i went ahead and talked to the social security
01:04:50.080 | person that was local and um she was super helpful and i said um i would like to take out i would
01:04:57.920 | like to receive it for as long as i'm still taking out money that jack put in i don't want to go past
01:05:04.240 | that and so she helped me figure out what he would have put in over all the years that he worked
01:05:09.280 | because he he did he paid taxes right he groused about it and then he became convinced that he
01:05:15.440 | shouldn't be grousing either so he quit grousing but it was glad jack's not here because it sounds
01:05:23.120 | like we've had a lot of the same struggles so um i began taking um social security and it was it was
01:05:31.280 | so great it was really nice we we um it just made things looser right and um and then there came and
01:05:38.320 | the the lady at the social security office that said this isn't how it works you know you just
01:05:44.400 | keep get keep taking it you know anyway but there came a point where we had reached i had written it
01:05:50.320 | down and i kept track of how much money and we had taken out what jack had put in and so i contacted
01:05:55.920 | her and i said i'd like to quit now and she said it isn't how it works you know you ought to just
01:06:01.360 | keep on taking and i said no i really want to quit now she said well it isn't that easy i'll have to
01:06:06.240 | present it to somebody and would you please um show us what money you have that is supporting
01:06:12.320 | you now so i did that and the board or whoever it was agreed that yes i could go off social security
01:06:18.720 | and so that was the end of that now my mom upped the the thing after a while she also gave us more
01:06:26.560 | money um one thing was that she liked her house at 80 degrees right and um so a little higher
01:06:34.240 | heating bill yes yes so but she um so she supported us generously more than it would have cost her to
01:06:40.880 | be at a retirement center great well i think that and so fast forward then your parents died
01:06:46.160 | and you cared for your dad for a while he died quickly and then your mom lived with you for many
01:06:52.240 | years and she eventually died and now you are living in the the mother or mother-in-law quarters
01:06:59.600 | that she paid for that's right and now you get to live with some of your family members right
01:07:04.000 | so my oldest daughter and her son and four children live in our big log house that my husband built
01:07:08.480 | great great her husband and four children um yes um so what a blessing another thing that is
01:07:17.040 | and this is just kind of another strange thing that we did besides having um home births we also
01:07:22.240 | um i'm delighted to say um uh here on our 20 acres we have a burial plot so we had a baby who died
01:07:33.360 | and she was buried there and my husband was buried there and my mom and my dad there's a place safe
01:07:38.320 | for me that's great so that's it's i would um i think that there is in one of the reasons i wanted
01:07:49.040 | to share your story with my audience is there is a richness in your story that is frequently
01:07:56.000 | increasingly harder to find in the united states of america um the the decisions and the lifestyle
01:08:04.960 | that you've described would have been frankly boring uh you know a century ago there's very
01:08:12.560 | little in what you have described that um a century ago would have been um out of character
01:08:19.840 | perhaps instead of teaching all your children at home they may have gone to the local one-room
01:08:25.280 | schoolhouse or perhaps you um you know instead of jack being able to telecommute he would have had
01:08:30.320 | to work locally but beyond that your story would be fairly typical and of course people would their
01:08:35.760 | heart their hearts would have gone out to you as a widow um in that era but in our modern era
01:08:41.760 | your story is very unusual um but yet there is a lot of truth and a lot of lessons in it
01:08:49.520 | that i think at least for me personally i i take note of and um from my observation we can look up
01:08:56.640 | here at your wall and i'm looking at a a picture of your your 12 surviving children and how many
01:09:04.160 | grandchildren now 17 17 grandchildren and um perhaps many more as your younger children um
01:09:10.800 | continue to marry and have children and do you feel rich i'm rich yeah and i think that's something
01:09:16.560 | that is lost um you know i have sat as a financial advisor i have sat at kitchen tables like this one
01:09:23.600 | with many with with some women some older single women some widowed and divorced women and and
01:09:30.640 | sometimes the finances um are lean i've i've been in those conversations and i've sought to help
01:09:37.280 | those ladies but sometimes the finances are abundant and yet the quality of life is is very
01:09:43.760 | low and uh i think that jack and i share a lot of um similarities from everything you told me about
01:09:50.000 | him in terms of ideology and moral quandaries and trying to figure out how to navigate these things
01:09:55.440 | and and yet i i think that if he were if he were still here um i i think he would be gratified to
01:10:05.280 | see the outcome of his decisions he was clearly a man with vision and he had a vision that went
01:10:09.440 | beyond just simply the amount of money in the bank account and um uh i i'm encouraged to see that
01:10:15.920 | i'm encouraged to see that go ahead i have one more thing and that was i think something that
01:10:20.000 | we talked about earlier was um that my grandfather uh set up a trust for my parents and for then his
01:10:28.560 | grand you know his grandchildren and i'm one of those so that that's now what supports me what a
01:10:34.240 | blessing yeah great so he had some financial um savvy that he exercised and yeah um i i reaped
01:10:43.760 | the benefit of that it isn't anything that i've done that's smart so well i think that that and
01:10:50.480 | i'll i'll share probably more with my audience elsewhere but the but when you have the two
01:10:55.440 | things together when you have wise financial planning mixed with instilling values and
01:11:00.400 | building a family culture that's where a strength is and if you had to choose you know i always
01:11:07.120 | looked at this way i remember when i was younger i worked with i worked a lot of of people and
01:11:12.720 | my wife and i we watched um there's a show on tv um with the the dugger family the the think they
01:11:18.400 | had i don't know a lot of kids and counting 17 kids and counting something like that and we watched
01:11:22.320 | some of those early episodes and i always looked at i always looked at him um and i thought to
01:11:27.200 | myself especially in some of the shows we haven't watched it in years but some of the shows where
01:11:30.720 | he started was starting to have grandchildren and i thought to myself now there's a man who
01:11:34.640 | at this point he's financially well off but i read his book and and they weren't wealthy in
01:11:39.040 | the beginning but i looked at the wealth that they had in the joy of his life and i said
01:11:45.280 | that's a wealthy man and you look at the joy of life and i've done financial planning for so many
01:11:51.440 | people who have plenty of money and they you know they have one estranged child right or um one of
01:12:00.800 | the saddest ones i had a friend of mine um a good good friend of mine from the financial planning
01:12:05.840 | business was very close to him but he was an older man and he and his wife were very wealthy
01:12:10.800 | they had one son who committed suicide when he was uh you know 19 20 years old and he had all
01:12:17.520 | the money in the world to do anything he wanted but the thing he most wanted would have done was
01:12:23.360 | of course to have his son back and it's just heartbreaking and to see that and i i came to
01:12:27.920 | the conviction i said um i don't think you have to choose love or money i don't think you have to
01:12:33.440 | choose and i think that you know i bet jack would agree with that he didn't feel like he had to
01:12:38.240 | choose he made a choice at the time to choose to work quarter time to choose to work half time he
01:12:42.000 | made choices intentionally and took ownership of them but if you did have to choose right i'd
01:12:47.280 | help i would a whole lot rather place my wife's future and her support in the hands of my siblings
01:12:56.400 | her children i would a whole lot rather trust the family network and that support network i would a
01:13:02.560 | whole lot rather trust the church than i would you know xyz life insurance company um now i it's my
01:13:09.600 | own conviction they can go together many people disagree with me um but but if i had to choose i
01:13:15.440 | would do that and that's what i appreciate about your story is you're sharing what that was like
01:13:20.080 | as uh as through that story so thank you thank you any other words of wisdom that you would love to
01:13:25.360 | share with in closing with my listeners as a grandmother who's had a wealth of life experience
01:13:32.480 | i've never um found god to be
01:13:38.080 | absent in trouble amen that he's present and that he's trustworthy amen amen thank you for being
01:13:49.200 | willing to turn the microphone on and record this i appreciate it it it will it encourages me as a
01:13:55.280 | younger man and uh it will encourage my listeners so thank you you're welcome sweet hop is an online
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