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My name is Joshua I am your host and today I'm thrilled to bring you a special story from a friend of mine who we are sitting face to face her name is Anne and we're sitting here in her home and I've known Anne's story for a while it's been inspirational to me and I thought how better to bring you something really useful as far as a little bit of of her story and how better to bring what better what better way to bring you a story of unusual financial circumstances than the story of an older lady a widow with 12 children whose husband died when how old was your youngest at that time and 10 months so you had you had at that time you and he had 12 children and your youngest was 10 months your oldest was in her early 20s and he had no life insurance is that right that's correct and I thought this would just be a a great story and a very inspirational and encouraging story that I really wanted to share with my audience so now that I've given just a little bit of an introduction I would love to back up a little bit tell me the story of you and your husband how you met how you married and how you came to build a life together yeah that's kind of a long story let's see what I can do um I'll make it short uh there was 15 years difference in our ages and when I was uh going to the university um I uh now how do I do this let's see I was taking a chemistry class that was very difficult for me because I wasn't good at math right and um my chemistry partner was not any better than I was and he told me that I should get together with this guy named Jack because Jack could help me with the chemistry he didn't just wouldn't just help me with a particular problem that I had what would make me understand where the problem was and bring me up to date I thought no I didn't want to go through all that bother so I didn't meet Jack at that time but Jack is the one that I eventually married wow um and the way we met was at that my chemistry partners lab partner um had a going away party and both of us were invited to that party so um Jack offered to walk me home afterwards I thought oh yeah this is just a wolf you know but um he was a gentleman he didn't want to see me walking home at night alone and we got to talking about the chronicles of Narnia and we both liked them and so we started up a chronicles of Narnia study etc etc etc you can take it from there but we had a um uh we enjoyed each other we got to know each other over time both of us at that time were committed to staying single unless God made it evident that we should get married to the other person and God made it evident so when did you marry we married in 1975 okay and at that time you were living out here in the western United States and uh your husband was working as a chemist yes he yes he was an analytical chemist wow and one of the things that I find most interesting is as his career developed even prior to the days of of uh of computer connection he worked out the ability to work remotely how did that come to happen okay so we wanted to move from where we lived um he had developed some health problems he had high blood pressure and he was using okay so he's a scientist and he was using himself as a guinea pig to find out what was causing it he came to the conclusion that at least one thing that was um influencing his blood pressure was that he was chemically sensitive okay and we were living in a place he had built a house for us in a place that had chemical exposure okay and we couldn't get away from that in our house we tried internally like with indoor air pollution to get rid of all plastics and all scented products and things like that but we were still not able to get rid of the chemicals there so we decided to move somewhere where we could build another house and um have it be chemically clean and where there was clean water and clean air and um preferably where food could grow and we could grow clean food and I think jack had in the back of his mind to to um move the family to a place where food was growing in abundance because I think that he also thought well it may be that I'll die from this um high blood pressure and um so we moved to a place that was a friendlier climate for food growing and um boy there was a lot of food there was a lot extra that nobody wanted that was going to waste we'll get to that as the story progresses but I want to when did he become sick was he sick before you married or did his illnesses emerge after you married it was emerged afterwards in fact we probably it was um after we had four children so however however long that is and so did did you think that did it seem like um could could he pinpoint a specific cause or he just started to develop ill health well he found out that he had high blood pressure okay and he um it was he had a headache right and so he went and uh to a chiropractor who had helped him before to get rid of a headache right found out his blood pressure was high right so in in his research into his own symptoms he came to you came to understand that um the various environmental toxins were really causing him to to feel worse and have a lot of problems yes and so one of the solutions that there were the solution that you came up with was to move to a more rural area where you would be more able to build your own home and build it free of toxins which today is very in vogue today you can pay lots of money to have products that you know low voc paint and all kinds of things but this was during the mid 80s do i have my timing right early 80s probably yes so early to mid 80s but he didn't have a source of income in the new place he was depending on the other source of income right do you remember how he worked so this this is prior to the days of email this is prior to the days of i guess you had telephones faxes physical you know going for business and and letters right those are your major right methods of communication maybe you could overnight packages with fedex but it was you could it was certainly more expensive then than it is now to do that how did he approach his boss and how did those negotiations go to be able to do this yes well um jack was kind of peculiar in lots of ways right um one of those that he had been working full-time until we got married and then when we were expecting our first baby i'm backing up here when we were expecting our first baby um he went to half-time and the reason why he went to half-time work was because he was thinking where on earth is this child going to go to go to school right so he started researching and then began a christian school for the town where we were living really and by the time she was um five years old though to ready to go into the kindergarten that he had established uh he was thinking oh no homeschooling is the way to go this is the so he um he phased himself out of the christian school so that we could homeschool our children wow and um but then as time went on by the time we were living um away from the town where he was being supported he had gone to quarter time wow now i think that you know that's helped by um being paid a lot per hour because he had his doctorate in chemistry right and he could earn more money per hour but he wanted also to devote himself to one building shelter for us and two um teaching the children so most homeschooling families the mom is the teacher in ours jack was the primary teacher wow we had a deal that i would take the little kids until they were fluent readers and then he would take over the teaching there i can empathize with him because i don't i don't do well with uh the idea of teaching our our little ones so my wife seems 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 don't i don't think i'm okay with the idea of her doing all the schooling for the older ones because i get so excited about all my ideas i'm like i want to do the teaching and they get a little bit older but teaching to read is not doesn't so i think jack and i are probably alike in a lot of ways yeah well and he loved he loved being with the little ones too it's just that sure um one of my jobs was keeping the little guys out of the way while he was teaching the bigger kids right but you know there's a lot do you know that there's a lot of osmosis that goes on there that you're teaching the older kids and the little kids pick up on it oh yeah absolutely i think that's one of the best the best things that that can happen is is it seems to me segwaying into educational philosophy because so at this point me out maybe back up so you homeschooled many children for many years yes so you probably have seen all kinds of different traditions had all kinds of exposure but one of the things i wish more and more for is i wish for a less age segregated society so that the way that in my opinion the way that learning happens at least for me is i get exposed to something i get an idea and then you circle around and you get it better and better and over time you learn more and more so that's what the one room schoolhouse model kind of provided that it provided exposure and and older children could teach younger children some of the concepts and that would cement those concepts for them younger children could be exposed to things that older children were working on and they would start to peak interest to interests at different times right and i think it seems like the one room schoolhouse model is is a thing of the past with the exception of a homeschooling environment where you can have that older and younger structure so i can also if you leave your son to teach the younger ones the canadian provinces you come back and they're jiving it that's funny so i'll just point out for the sake of my audience because in jack's story there are some lessons that i are things that i frequently wish to impress upon my listeners and one of those is if you have developed your skills in the marketplace so that they are highly marketable then in in the equation of time you don't always have to keep working 60 hours a week if your if your hourly rate is much higher it provides you with opportunities to make some of these life changes as as jack did and we lived quite simply on that quarter time but why did you live simply from the beginning i think partly largely um i guess we didn't feel like it we needed to spend a lot of money on ourselves and jack liked to do everything himself he liked to start from scratch on things and um it made it so you could give more money away right so back so in that time period if that was late 70s early 80s you would have been involved kind of in the vanguard of of the homeschool revolution that happened in the united states was homeschooling legal when you started with your children well in our state it it was a moot point nobody knew and so jack was instrumental in helping that homeschool law to be written great well as a younger parent to an older i say thank you i've studied a little bit of the history of what many of you did during the 80s and we younger parents are very appreciative for relatively how easy we have it so so thank you for that so you guys went on and he built a house the house that you lived in and then found out about the toxins and so at that time uh you were moving so back to how we negotiated that with his employer he was already working a quarter time okay yes so um um he had also i don't know when that came in but he he felt bad about being on a salary uh because um when he didn't work very much then he'd still get a whole lot of money and when he worked a whole lot he didn't get very much money so he had negotiated that with his boss somewhere along the line there he did um that he would be paid on an hourly basis and so um he felt then the liberty to to spend more time building on the house sometimes and then when money was short he'd work a whole lot of chemistry work and so that worked out really well too um i think that his boss valued him and uh was willing to work with what he could do and jack was demonstrating that he could come down to be uh on site sometimes um when needed but otherwise there was a whole lot that he could do just he would travel back and forth from the more rural location to the more city location where the employer was right and the rest of the time phone calls faxes faxes were the packages and then we did get fedex a lot great great so when you moved to uh this rural location what was it that attracted you to this area beauty that we um there were various people that told us uh we would ask people that we'd meet who seemed to have similar views that we had what's the best place in the world and they would tell us various places and um so one time we decided to take a trip and look at some of those places and somewhere in between we found what we really liked and um it uh it has i'm going to go ahead and say it has mountains and it has water and it has um trees and it's beautiful right right and we're just being slightly cagey with the details just for your own benefit to avoid having any uh publicity which would be an annoyance to you uh our audience can figure that out but but you were telling me the story you and he were up here um you had five children and you're camping in the area and you're camping by a lake and you fell in love with the place but here you are you got five little children in a tent your tent blew blew down in the middle of the night there was a big storm that came up the tent blew down we had to dig our way out of the canvas you know to get to the van um and then the rain came down but uh yeah in the midst of all of that we still just loved it we just loved the the beauty of the place primarily so you bought the place as raw land forested mountainous land right right right and also that the area is like i said very fruitful right and so there's nothing there was nothing here no infrastructure uh when you moved here and so what did you do how did you develop the property the first thing that we did was um bring in power okay but to do that it um the power company wanted 20 feet of free space with no trees around it so that 20 foot swath down the hill took six weeks to clear chainsaws chainsaws two tractors there was a a woman who came to help and she was like six feet tall and very strong wow and with a big heart and she came and helped us wow and um it took quite a lot of doing also to dig the hole for the outhouse because there are a lot of rocks in this ground so that wasn't very practical of us if we wanted to be building um like having a garden and growing food to buy a hillside that had lots of rocks but um we loved the view so much that we went ahead did that and then uh over time jack built the soil up and made the flower bed you know the garden beds so it was about 10 acres right it was 10 acres 10 acres that you bought do you remember how much you paid for it yes it was um 15 000 for the 10 acres did you he paid for it you paid for it with savings that you guys had well that was how did you finance we sold the house okay where we had lived before that jack built now he when he built that house it was also he built it um we didn't go into debt for the land and we didn't go into debt as we built the house but we also didn't get to move into it very soon either right and then we also moved into it a little sooner than we might have it because we wanted to put all the money into that house so when we sold that house um we had enough money to make the move and to buy the land and to begin building the new house and i'll just say that um at partway through um my father said you know this easement trouble that you're having you ought to just buy the other lot that's next to you so that's another 10 acres so we ended up with 20 acres so we had a little less money for building the house when it came to building the house bit by bit jack worked and worked and he hired somebody um there was a young man in the church who was just a brand new christian and um as was jack's custom he wanted to input in this guy's life and the guy was big and strong too so he hired him to work with him on the project and then they could visit as they worked right did you and he before you married did you talk about things like not borrowing money for houses or was this the kind of thing that emerged after you married um there were some things about jack that well a lot of things about jack that i liked a lot one of them was that i kept hearing rumors okay so he worked full time and he made quite a lot of money and um people he didn't tell me but other people told me that okay so this guy who was in the geology department um had a nice truck and it was because jack had bought the nice truck and then given it as a really good deal to this guy and there were just a lot of generous stories that i heard from other people so i knew that jack was a giver he he lived quite modestly and um i liked that i liked that about him that he um i guess didn't have a lot of toys so to speak and um his his hobbies were he loved fly fishing and hiking and things like that i just i liked the idea i guess i liked how simply he lived so i'll so so oh you asked did we talk about it when you were a how old were you when you married i was 21 and so he was then he was 36 right okay so when you were 21 were um well let me give the background the reason i'm asking as a younger man to an older woman one of the challenges that i observe in marriage today is my wife my wife's generations generation many of our friends and many younger women are they've come from they've never known lack right now depending on the circumstances of course some people come from from lack some people have learned how to to um uh well many people come from difficult situations and my wife her you know she was raised by a single mom who had just a very small amount of money and so those lessons went deep within her and one of the things that i really appreciated about her and was attracted to that she was she was frugal she was she was not high maintenance she's not uh she's not high maintenance she doesn't require a lot she's not constantly frustrating with all the things that that she would like to have but a lot of um but i also have a lot of friends and many times their husbands uh you know when we're talking privately one of the things that's frustrating is how inflexible their wives are and one of the challenges for many husbands is how do i do some of the things that i'd like to do for our family that require sacrifice in the short term and it's a question i've thought a lot about and i've never quite known obvious known what to say other than be careful before you marry marry somebody who's not high maintenance marry somebody who's willing to to do that and then be willing to carefully share and work diligently to share over time a vision and to show how times of sacrifice are temporary but when i when i hear your story and when you uh talk about you know being young and and building a house moving into the house before it's finished uh and of course having five small children when your husband is building a house a cabin in the woods though that's hard it's it seems romantic when you read the book but they're here about it but it's a lot of hard sweaty days and a lot of crying children and a lot of penny pinching and a lot of going without nice things and it i guess i'm not i guess the the question i'm i'm wondering is did you were you went along with those and you went along with those ideas you went along with your husband in that was that something that he led you in after being married or were you always that kind of adventurous person that's a good question and i don't know how he would have known to evaluate me on that either um i know that as a girl i used to grow up i had a friend named claudia and we would play um brave pioneer woman and what that was was basically i dare you to do this because a brave pioneer woman would do this right and it was very stupid things that we did with each other but i kind of had that um that was kind of a something that i liked when i was in junior high was that idea of being a brave pioneer woman so um uh i think that sometimes people have looked at our lives and looked at like that we had so many children and looked at like sometimes um uh okay so one time there was a man who came to visit us when we lived in our log house we didn't have glass in the windows yet we didn't have a door yet we didn't you know and um and he said jack you're a rich man and he was looking at the family and um the the family riches that we had not it was obvious not what we had in our um like materially um but um i just want to say that jack uh and i did these things together it wasn't um it wasn't that he was leading me necessarily i mean he did lead me 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 together and um one thing that goes into this is that uh jack with a strong christian slant was practically libertarian in his politics jack and i would have gotten along really well the more i learned about him i met him once when i was a kid but the more i learned about him we would have we would have talked for hours that's funny so um so but that extended to like he he hated to even pin up the goats that we had and the chickens that we had he'd like liberty liberty was so important to him and as his wife he was so um he was concerned with my liberty too so he was not pushing anything on me i remember when we were building the house in um that city place um he said you know if i'm going to be building this then i'm not going to be available to help with the children and that was when we had three children and um he said is it worth it is is that going to is that going to be something you can live with that i'm not going to be here to be helping with dishes or kids or you know a lot of this you're going to be on your own 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 that doesn't appeal to me but we're going to just have to remember that together as time goes on and it's hard then we'll just say yeah but remember we thought it was worth it so we were going to remind each other oh yeah it's worth it and it really was worth it but we did um count the cost before we started did you and jack hope to have a large family from the early years or how did that emerge we were we wanted to have children but we sure didn't think we were going to have as many as we did um i was just talking to your wife about this um earlier uh what happened was we had four pretty much in a row and um and then jack said you know you're bushed you're tired no more kids until you rest up right so um we were uh very careful to not have any more children for a time and then i went through a kind of a rebellion and it was a rebellion against the societal uh norms in the united states um and the the thing was that i was seeing just sex sex sex you know like as far as movies and advertising and things like that but not connected to children and um and not necessarily in marriage like marriage married people are so careful and um i liked the idea of um planting when it's time for something to grow and not using herbicide and pesticide and whatever to make things not grow right and so the idea of being fruitful kind of grew in my mind and i thought it would be a a pleasure to be fruitful and so that's i kind of went through that rebellion so then um after that then it was kind of a free-for-all except that we spaced the children too right well i can understand that with um the age of our children they're in my and i always had this theory that the hardest time is when you have multiple young ones but your oldest is not old enough to help i think that's true that most children i ever had was two or three i think right maybe four that was the most i ever had because after that i had help right right and that's uh i told my wife that from the very beginning i said i'm convinced that three is the hardest number because your oldest is not you're outnumbered and yet your oldest is basically still useless whereas beyond that uh your oldest can be more useful and can help you to work with the younger ones and and that's so valuable for them to help them develop character and be able to to grow as adults so when you moved um here to build the cabin you had how old was your oldest do you remember about yes when we moved here she was 12 okay um and probably well when we when we were in the house i know we were in the house um and things were you know pretty civilized um then we had glass in the windows yet yes or at least this most of them we had plastic over some of them you know um here's a trick for people who are have plastic over their windows if you have cats put chicken wire over the plastic and then they can't scratch their way in good trick yeah it sounds from hard one experience that's right so um uh the oldest then was 14.

okay okay so um now jack was not he he wasn't like he was a contractor no he was a he was a a self-taught man he was a uh he would learn himself so at that time he learned how to build from reading books asking questions right right right well and um the uh he had built a dog house before he built our house in in um the city and um the only class that ever got a dn was woodworking wow so um it was a challenge for him and another thing about him was that he um he tested out pretty strongly as a perfectionist at work right and then we did one for just as a couple and he was not nearly as perfectionistic so that was really a blessing for me because i'm not perfect right um but uh i loved it that he went ahead and um built and with a log house particularly everything is irregular you know um it's not dimensional logs and um he was willing to just do it and i encouraged him in it um and not worry about it not being perfect and that was that was great i i loved seeing that side of him right right to just go ahead well such a neat story and i think it should be more common than it is when you have somebody who is intensely intellectual um like a phd in chemistry and a working active research chemist i think it's often helpful to have an outlet for physical labor and be challenged and things that you're not you're not skilled in it's true and um i always noticed that my grandfather i don't know if you remember this but my grandfather was a chemist and he didn't have a phd i think he had a master's degree in chemistry but he taught chemistry for many years but he was also often working with things and i always felt like those two things go together really well to have an intensely intellectual pursuit and then also to have a chance to go out and work with something in your hands where it's where you have a chance for your body to work and your mind and he also found that so satisfying because with his chemistry he wasn't sure that he was actually benefiting mankind with it right um he had patents that had never been used and um he just didn't see that but when he would build a table we would eat on the table and when he built a house we lived in the house and when he planted you know seeds they would grow and we'd eat the things and that was very satisfying to him so did jack's health improve when you moved out here no so the in fact it got worse okay so the allergens the things the toxins didn't seem to have as direct an influence as you thought yeah maybe maybe that's right okay um and if um and i just don't think we were able to get away from everything even being out here that he would react to yes got it so um he um there came a point where his pattern had been that he would have um high blood pressure spikes that would last three days and then there'd be a time where it would just be normal high um and there came a point where uh instead of the three days it went five days and he said oops can't do this because when his blood pressure was super high he wasn't able to eat or sleep or think or anything so he went ahead and went on a high blood pressure medication then people have frowned at him about not going on high blood pressure medication before that but he was trying to see if he could did it help oh yes okay the the medication helped a lot okay um so so um so that so then um fast forward a number of years you living in the house built the house developing the land planting gardens and things but it's not a farm it's a you know we're in a mountainous rural place and um he was continuing to work as a chemist that whole time yes mostly um there he had been working for a mining company and then the mining um industry kind of tanked for a while so then he was involved in um environmental cleanup with some similar processes and um and then when money got uh tighter than that because he just didn't have that kind of work then he and the kids did lawn mowing wow and raking leaves and things like that any kind of jobs that would come up so by virtue of being out of debt though and having a paid-for house and the area we're in the area we were in has relatively low taxes and such even though he wasn't able to work in his high-paying occupation as a chemist he was still able to support the family with relatively manual labor is that yes yes except that we also had um opportunities in this area because things do grow here um it's easy to get free potatoes it's easy to get there are a lot of people who have fruit trees and they just have too much fruit and it's going to go to waste and so i went ahead and asked god to um alert me to food that was going to go to waste and i would 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 knew how to to um can and freeze and dry things and so uh that also made it easy to live here what is your analysis as a mother of the cost of children you know there's a famous u.s department of uh camera which department was a famous government study that comes out and talks about how much each child costs and the range is something like 130 000 per year what's your perspective though as a mother of many as far as the costs of children okay somebody asked me this once and um and i was supposed to tell her specifically and i said you know it doesn't count we don't really count because um when we had our babies at home um so we didn't need to pay for hospital things and um another thing is that we really didn't go to the doctor very much and um and then also we uh had hand-me-downs people would give us clothes or else we would go to second-hand stores and get clothes um we just didn't do things traditionally that way so um i don't i have no idea but i know that at one point jack figured out with our um when we had a large family by this time probably i don't know i'm guessing maybe we had at least 10 children um he figured out that uh we were averaging 50 cents a meal per person okay wow so when we we thought about buying an apple he said and um an apple cost 50 cents right right there's definitely a different in the economies of scale when it comes to cooking for children there's you definitely i think embrace different recipes you embrace a different approach just to feed a lot of people healthfully versus uh versus a small number one of my grown daughters now who has children of her own said i used to think that we ate according to like healthful things now i realize we ate what was cheap and the great thing is those don't have to be opposed no no healthfully and inexpensively so jack died when he was 61 correct right now did did you and he know that he was going to die was he kind of okay yeah so when he went on his when he went on the blood pressure medication he found out that his kidneys were functioning half of what they should and um then later um when he um was working at a well actually he was going to go to cincinnati and work at a place where they did radioactive um they had radioactive materials there he had to take a short course to learn how to be safe in that place we also have to shave off his beard so that he could wear a mask right but um at that time he had to have a physical exam so that they would know what his baseline health was uh so that he couldn't sue them later for the damage that he'd received at the plant um and they at that time he learned that his kidneys were a quarter of uh functioning and the doctor then said uh you have um in three years you'll need dialysis in five years you'll need a transplant he said you're in great health except that you're going to die tomorrow right well if you know you're going to die at least you could be in good health until until that happens so he so you and he had an expectation that the the days could be short there was no yes clarity on timing but you had an expectation the days could be short yes what did you do we had already been doing all sorts of things diet things one of my girls wrote a thing about this and said um almost none of what we did medically was um conventional and so um what did we do we prayed uh and it looked like to us that we had been praying all along but as time went on we it was obvious that he was getting worse rather than better and that it looked like god was not going to answer our prayers to heal him and we considered dialysis and dialysis at that time if you were able to do the in-home dialysis which was not a good option for jack for other reasons um in-home dialysis uh would cost thirty thousand dollars a year he didn't make thirty thousand dollars a year and he was opposed to okay so here it comes political things again he didn't like that um the government was involved in certain aspect uh aspects of our life so medical care is one and he didn't want to take from people like the money that had been taken involuntarily from people he did not want to use that for himself for medical things so he didn't want to use a governmental um health plan like medicaid right and he didn't we didn't have the money um so uh and he was not willing to enter into that and jeopardize the house and the land he wanted that family to be um if he was going to die and it looked like he was going to die soon then he didn't want to take make the the go into debt for that right um and he was firmly convinced that god could heal him if he wanted to so he assumed that this was his time to die if these other things were not in place i did ask him um what because five people offered him their kidneys for a transplant and he um he wasn't willing to do that because it was going to again cost a lot and i said well jack okay so what if there was somebody who was super rich and they really wanted to donate this money to you and they wouldn't miss it for a transplant what would you think then he said well if that were the case then i'd need to consider it i'd need to think about it but now i don't even need to think about it right did um did you did did you and jack consider having private health insurance was he opposed to private health insurance or no not private would have been fine and um we had been part of a health care sharing ministry before wow and so you go way back right yeah but then um it wasn't until after he died that i became part of a health care sharing ministry now with the kids and myself right but when you um when jack died he didn't have any life insurance he had no insurance was that something intentional what was did you did he think about did you guys ever think about having life insurance um at one point i asked jack so this is going to be kind of from the side on that question but at one point i asked jack you know all these people financial counselors say you ought to have savings right you know maybe we should be having a savings thing jack and he said and we're never going to need money more than we need it right now that's the challenge so um uh no he we he um we didn't have money in the bank to speak of and we didn't have life insurance i don't know that he was opposed to that yeah well one time he probably wouldn't have qualified you know once once he started to develop those types of symptoms he hardly would have qualified for life insurance anyway so i can set your mind at ease yeah no that just but as a long time seller of life insurance it's always i'm always interested to learn you know okay but we did have somebody who was presenting a life insurance policy to us right and when he found out that we really hadn't been to doctors to speak of he said oh i might be able to give you get you life insurance you know because there's nothing on record that shows that you have right but we didn't want to do that and we didn't have money for that right absolutely so um you know you make choices yeah and then you live with those choices that you make and i i would guess if jack were sitting here i mean do you think he would regret anything obviously he was a man of conviction and he lived through his convictions right and i i appreciate that i mean that's one of the things that i think we've lost an appreciation for obviously we all have to consider our own path and we have to walk in faith and we're all accountable for our decisions we're accountable to ourselves we're accountable to the lord we're accountable to our family for and each of us has to make the decisions but i appreciate um people who are clear on their their convictions their conscience and who walk up rightly um without sacrificing those things and i i really appreciate that i thought of one more thing there was a chart that i saw and i showed it to jack and it was talking about um the outcome like if you have a kidney transplant and it was showing um it was a graph and it showed how long people lived after a kidney transplant right what the statistics were and if you had one early on before your kidneys were too bad you had a lot better chance of it lasting for quite a long time but on this chart they had cut out all the people who died in the first six weeks after the transplant and they had cut out all the people who had who were diabetic also so that they weren't part of this study right and um still the um rate of death over not very many years was high right people didn't live a long time even though they'd had not i mean sometimes it does work but this you know um it didn't look good right on there and jack was just looking at diminishing returns like you go into terrific debt and no time to pay it off and maybe not live that long anyway and beyond um immune suppressants yeah so yeah dealing with medical decisions and when you are an intelligent person and you're able to look and to consider the medical wisdom for a certain condition you're able to consider medical treatments you're able to look at it and you consider conventional medicine um approaches you consider the outcome you consider unconventional medicine approaches it's challenging um because and it's especially challenging when you when you have faith in god and his hand in your life because every decision has to be measured in in that context and then when you look carefully at the numbers and you look carefully at okay what's the percentage of this happening of this treatment providing i think almost anybody has a place at which you know certain percentages chances of success and unless you unless your entire operating mindset is the only thing that matters is how many days i live on the earth we all have to look at the data and then seek to make a decision in light of it and and one of the things that's most difficult and i appreciate i'm seeking i'm trying to be straightforward on the discussion because i think it's worth having but one of the things that's so challenging is in hindsight um when you know the outcome right you know the outcome jack's dead when you know the outcome of a situation and now my parents went through this with my own family when my sister died and and then all of a sudden um you are standing there and you have to give an accounting of everything that you have done of the medical advice that you have sought of the treatments you've gotten and especially when you bring in religion uh especially those of us who may tend more towards kind of a fundamentalist type of of expression or what people would label fundamentalism that has a different um connotation or different denotation depending on you know who's using the term but there are some there are a lot of people who are just um i would say there are some people who i would say are um irresponsible right and i and um and so we want to be very careful not to be irresponsible but there's also different ways of understanding the meaning of responsibility and that's what's so frustrating especially this question we're dealing with some pretty heavy stuff because all of us with our children with our own decisions with our family members we must be responsible we must understand but as you say i mean jack was not a stupid man right so so here's something that jack had to deal with early on in his life and this is before i knew him um he had to decide uh he was very bright and he had to decide uh what am i gonna live for right and um he decided that he would not try to be a great chemist he would try to be a good chemist but to be a great chemist he would need to devote himself to that and he wanted to devote himself to jesus christ there was a point in his life where he realized that he was known for his political views rather than for his beliefs and he changed that too so that he didn't um he still had those political beliefs but he didn't tout them as much he didn't um that wasn't the lion's share of his attention um and in his life with us he could have made a lot of money and he would have had money to be having life insurance and all that but we wouldn't have had him right he wouldn't have been around for the kids and for me for me right so i really actually i really appreciate the choices that he made um i just talked with my sister not long ago and she was really angry with jack because he um deserted us he left us by dying by dying right and he didn't pursue he was selfish he should have done everything he should have taken care of the medical uh he should have pursued the medical things that we have now in modern medicine that can help somebody who has kidney trouble to survive and um so um that was one night that she was really she said i'm just still mad at him and the next morning i said okay so would you be willing to hear some of our thoughts about that and how we came to that decision and she said yes and so we talked and afterwards she said well i'm not so mad at him anymore but i still disagree with some of the choices he made and i think that that's a legitimate thing everybody has to make choices yeah i think we all have probably most of us would look back at some of our choices and and um we make the best choices we know at the time the information we have the decision making is is not easy and um you know my i was talking with a client of mine the other day and we're talking about choices and the problem with hard choices is hard joy the hardest the easy choices are the easiest choices are always when you have a good option and a lot of bad options those are always easy to know the hardest choices are either when you have no good option or you have several good options because choosing among no good options is really hard or choosing among several good options is very hard and unfortunately in hindsight it's one thing to look and to say hey you know we may would have made different choice but you may have different information which now shows hey certainly is different in 2018 the medical treatment for kidney disease may be very different than it was in 1986 or 1996 or 98 or 88 so i want to go back now to the finances and thank you for being willing to talk about i think these are the kinds of decisions and discussions that we wrestle with and all we all have to wrestle with um but i appreciate your your being willing to talk about them so um you've told me that before jack died he he he had a sense that he wasn't sure how much longer it was going to be and he called your family together for a family meeting right tell me about that so um he this was for the older kids primarily i don't know if the little kids were involved at all but he talked to the older kids and he said um okay so you guys this is what it takes to uh support our family in lean times and uh you just now heard my oldest daughter say he said that uh two people working minimum wage would support our family so my daughters two of my daughters said daddy we'd like to take that job on we would like to work and support the family when you die this was a your eldest was 24 or 23 or 24 and then your second one this was not this was your fourth daughter right how old was she at the time about 19 or 20 or so yeah i guess okay and you had two other children in between but they had school and so they said dad we would like to do this one was sick yeah right um right so they said that they would like to do that that they would do support the family and so he was contented with that he was happy about that great and uh so that was the plan and things changed though so he died he died your daughters then did go to go and get jobs and do that or what they did they did now they they didn't know they they both were working one was working for a christian school and one was working for a christian like adventure camp thing and so they they weren't very high paying jobs so they didn't know if they needed they needed to quit those jobs and get other jobs but um it worked out fine because what happened was uh right after jack died when our friends heard that he had died uh so many people sent money to us just and i have this form that i'm going to share with you later but um so many people sent money to us and then after that um monthly there were some people who supported us every month they would send money to us and um they just committed to that blessing it was and some of them i didn't even know and one of the churches i'd never been to and didn't know those people but they supported us too and um and it one time jessica my oldest who was one of the people supporting us um came home to visit and she said oh you guys are eating or drinking orange juice you guys are you know i think i'll go ahead and buy some shampoo she had really been um living very frugally so that she could give me all the money wow so did uh did you didn't say that you know jack was some kind of public preacher it wasn't like you guys had developed a family ministries and established a company and going all around trying to to gin up support for yourselves he was just living his life or laboring in his family but somehow when he died um these people felt the the desire and the burden to to support you okay so yes that's true and and i'll just say too that um okay so our oldest daughter just a minute our oldest daughter um was very physically active and socially active and wanted to do everything and so um jack kept um supplying her with things so that there were there was a homeschool uh teen group that he formed and there was a track meet that they started and there was eventually it ended up being a thing that uh uh he did statewide for all the homeschoolers which was um athletics arts and academics um competitions and prizes and judging and um so he was well known that way and uh he had also uh taught chemistry for the local christian school for the high school there in fact when he was dying he was he just had very little energy um he was cutting things out and one of the things i suggested that he cut out was teaching that chemistry lab here at our our place and he said oh no that energizes me right now i'm gonna keep doing that so you accounted that when people heard that jack had died and you of course were widowed with 12 children oldest 23 or 4 youngest under a year so eight minors yeah so um so then you said that people sent money um totaling thousands of dollars yes um and so what did you do what did you do with the money okay so um i think this is where i'm going to tell i'm going to read this um paper to you um my oldest uh minor um okay so she was a senior when jack died in our homeschool and uh she wanted to go to college but um wasn't emotionally ready for that i don't think it's an easy thing to lose your daddy and um and so she took a second senior year going to our local christian school and then she wanted to go to wheaton college and uh academically she was qualified for that um so we applied for the financial scholarship and uh the form came for me to fill out and uh there was there was no blank on there for me to say where my income what my income was so i had to put zero on it so they sent me another form and i still had to put zero they had blanked out the places where i might be able to say something so finally they sent me this form this is verification of low parent income it says since the income which you represent reported for 2001 appears unusually low we must verify the information before making a decision on financial assistance for your son or daughter please answer the questions below giving as much detailed information as possible so there are six questions one what was your family monthly cost of housing in 2001 we own uh oh i said 106 dollars prorated property tax so hold on a second so the question is what was your monthly monthly cost of housing and your answer is 106 dollars which is the the prorated monthly property tax right right um and i said we own our own home and land from what income source was this paid gifts my two daughters seven families and two churches gave us monthly money our monthly income averaged about two thousand four hundred dollars what was the monthly cost of utilities in 2001 about four hundred dollars i said we have wood heat and that helps from what income source were utilities costs paid gifts see above many people did work to bring and ready wood for our heating so we paid nothing for that what was the approximate monthly cost of food in 2001 about three hundred dollars this includes detergent and others costs uh from what income source were food costs paid we were given a pickup load of food 800 pounds of potatoes gift certificates for groceries much frozen and canned and fresh food and a half of beef etc our grocery bill was low because of this what was the monthly cost of transportation in 2001 about 365 dollars it may have been more averaging out for tires and repairs we own our vehicles from what income source were transportation costs paid we paid this with gift money the mechanic also gave us discounts did you or your son or daughter receive any other support that was not reported on the FAFSA Wheaton College financial aid application or verification worksheet gifts see above also when my husband first died November 2000 there was a great inflow of money that was not monthly this came from many people in 2001 we received more than 15 000 from approximately 45 people or groups who were not the ones who gave to us monthly i used that money to help finish our house and for permanent improvements to our place and that's the end of that so that was i made this out June 3rd 2002.

Wow what a blessing i appreciate being i appreciate people's sensitivity to when you know of a need to go and to give money towards it and it's neat to hear just the testimony of God's faithfulness i would imagine although you may look back on it and perhaps some of the the fear and the uncertainty may have faded by now but i would imagine that as a newly widowed mother there was a lot on your shoulders and there was a before jack died i took a walk and i talked heart to heart with God and i said um okay so father you know that jack is the organized person in the family he's the one who's the good the teacher he's the one who makes the money he's the one who um is practical uh if you take him you know what you're going to be left with that's me do you want to do this and um and then i i asked him for several things one i asked him for uh his name not to be besmirched because of our decisions and our choices and i also asked him if he would make it so that my family didn't have to be involved in our provision right because i knew that that would not be a good testimony uh because we were putting our trust in God right and they thought we were being kind of stupid to do that right um and he answered those prayers yeah no it wasn't easy emotionally emotionally mostly you know and just because i didn't want to be responsible well you got a chance to to uh to learn so did you continue homeschooling at that time yes yes yes and and i found out about um the widow let's see what is it called um the widow's curriculum fund which is through the homeschool legal defense hslda yeah um and they if you want to continue homeschooling and you're a widow um then um you can tell them what you would like to get for your curriculum and if that's something that they think is legit and um you have a need then they supply that so they supplied me with curriculum for years and years there came a time and this was so much this was really a cool thing because they had been so generous and you know i i didn't think that um i didn't think that it was that big a deal to me except that every time i received the check to pay for those things i cried because it was such a sweet thing and that's um they said they supply that money because um people give to that fund um but uh there came a point where i didn't know i had my last child at home and um my finances were changing and um i didn't know where i stood and so i applied for the curriculum fund widow's curriculum fund and they said you know um you uh are have enough money now that we won't support you and that was such a blessing to me too right when she said that i said oh i have enough money now i don't have to worry about this right right so that was really a sweet thing what a blessing did you ever um apply for any government uh assistant programs okay that's an interesting thing too um so jack didn't like social social security right right and um so uh jack didn't like no he didn't like social security and so one time he even wrote the social security number uh office the uh administration a letter saying uh i'd like to opt out of this now you can keep all the money i've put in right but i don't want to participate in this anymore and i won't read i won't expect anything and they said well no this isn't a voluntary program and he said yeah yeah i guess i knew that right right um but um when um okay so i i i talked about what happened um for that first year after jack died after that my parents um were in an unhappy situation where my father needed um more care than my mother could give him 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 well she financed building a little place on to our big house and um they decided then to so they financed the house and then instead of paying money to the retirement center they gave us the money that they would that they were paying for their housing and stuff yeah it was great because we could live on that it's fine right um so um after uh i forgot where i was going you were talking about government programs oh yes yes so after after my mother moved in my siblings and i got together and they were uneasy because i didn't have um health insurance and they said and i just want to say that my siblings are the greatest they're just wonderful and they're not greedy people but they were concerned that my mom then would be in a position of wanting to pay for any medical costs that we might have so they said we want you to get some sort of medical insurance and that's when i went on the um the health care sharing program that's not insurance but it's something i felt fine about doing and um and they said we also want you to take social security for the children that's available for you you ought to be taking it and i i said oh you know i'll seriously consider that let me clarify what they want you to take was the widow and orphans benefit from social security which is available to any minor of minor child of somebody who has died while enrolled while fully accredited accredited in the social security program right right so um i i had reservations about that but i thought okay if jack had the opportunity to go and take out all that he put in um to the social security administration then he would have liked to take so i i i didn't know how that would work but i went ahead and talked to the social security person that was local and um she was super helpful and i said um i would like to take out i would 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 that and so she helped me figure out what he would have put in over all the years that he worked because he he did he paid taxes right he groused about it and then he became convinced that he shouldn't be grousing either so he quit grousing but it was glad jack's not here because it sounds like we've had a lot of the same struggles so um i began taking um social security and it was it was so great it was really nice we we um it just made things looser right and um and then there came and the the lady at the social security office that said this isn't how it works you know you just keep get keep taking it you know anyway but there came a point where we had reached i had written it down and i kept track of how much money and we had taken out what jack had put in and so i contacted 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 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 present it to somebody and would you please um show us what money you have that is supporting you now so i did that and the board or whoever it was agreed that yes i could go off social security and so that was the end of that now my mom upped the the thing after a while she also gave us more money um one thing was that she liked her house at 80 degrees right and um so a little higher heating bill yes yes so but she um so she supported us generously more than it would have cost her to be at a retirement center great well i think that and so fast forward then your parents died and you cared for your dad for a while he died quickly and then your mom lived with you for many years and she eventually died and now you are living in the the mother or mother-in-law quarters that she paid for that's right and now you get to live with some of your family members right so my oldest daughter and her son and four children live in our big log house that my husband built great great her husband and four children um yes um so what a blessing another thing that is and this is just kind of another strange thing that we did besides having um home births we also 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 and she was buried there and my husband was buried there and my mom and my dad there's a place safe 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 to share your story with my audience is there is a richness in your story that is frequently increasingly harder to find in the united states of america um the the decisions and the lifestyle that you've described would have been frankly boring uh you know a century ago there's very little in what you have described that um a century ago would have been um out of character perhaps instead of teaching all your children at home they may have gone to the local one-room schoolhouse or perhaps you um you know instead of jack being able to telecommute he would have had to work locally but beyond that your story would be fairly typical and of course people would their heart their hearts would have gone out to you as a widow um in that era but in our modern era your story is very unusual um but yet there is a lot of truth and a lot of lessons in it that i think at least for me personally i i take note of and um from my observation we can look up here at your wall and i'm looking at a a picture of your your 12 surviving children and how many grandchildren now 17 17 grandchildren and um perhaps many more as your younger children um continue to marry and have children and do you feel rich i'm rich yeah and i think that's something that is lost um you know i have sat as a financial advisor i have sat at kitchen tables like this one with many with with some women some older single women some widowed and divorced women and and sometimes the finances um are lean i've i've been in those conversations and i've sought to help those ladies but sometimes the finances are abundant and yet the quality of life is is very low and uh i think that jack and i share a lot of um similarities from everything you told me about him in terms of ideology and moral quandaries and trying to figure out how to navigate these things and and yet i i think that if he were if he were still here um i i think he would be gratified to see the outcome of his decisions he was clearly a man with vision and he had a vision that went beyond just simply the amount of money in the bank account and um uh i i'm encouraged to see that i'm encouraged to see that go ahead i have one more thing and that was i think something that we talked about earlier was um that my grandfather uh set up a trust for my parents and for then his grand you know his grandchildren and i'm one of those so that that's now what supports me what a blessing yeah great so he had some financial um savvy that he exercised and yeah um i i reaped the benefit of that it isn't anything that i've done that's smart so well i think that that and i'll i'll share probably more with my audience elsewhere but the but when you have the two things together when you have wise financial planning mixed with instilling values and building a family culture that's where a strength is and if you had to choose you know i always looked at this way i remember when i was younger i worked with i worked a lot of of people and my wife and i we watched um there's a show on tv um with the the dugger family the the think they had i don't know a lot of kids and counting 17 kids and counting something like that and we watched some of those early episodes and i always looked at i always looked at him um and i thought to myself especially in some of the shows we haven't watched it in years but some of the shows where he started was starting to have grandchildren and i thought to myself now there's a man who at this point he's financially well off but i read his book and and they weren't wealthy in the beginning but i looked at the wealth that they had in the joy of his life and i said that's a wealthy man and you look at the joy of life and i've done financial planning for so many people who have plenty of money and they you know they have one estranged child right or um one of the saddest ones i had a friend of mine um a good good friend of mine from the financial planning business was very close to him but he was an older man and he and his wife were very wealthy they had one son who committed suicide when he was uh you know 19 20 years old and he had all the money in the world to do anything he wanted but the thing he most wanted would have done was of course to have his son back and it's just heartbreaking and to see that and i i came to the conviction i said um i don't think you have to choose love or money i don't think you have to choose and i think that you know i bet jack would agree with that he didn't feel like he had to choose he made a choice at the time to choose to work quarter time to choose to work half time he made choices intentionally and took ownership of them but if you did have to choose right i'd help i would a whole lot rather place my wife's future and her support in the hands of my siblings her children i would a whole lot rather trust the family network and that support network i would a whole lot rather trust the church than i would you know xyz life insurance company um now i it's my own conviction they can go together many people disagree with me um but but if i had to choose i would do that and that's what i appreciate about your story is you're sharing what that was like as uh as through that story so thank you thank you any other words of wisdom that you would love to share with in closing with my listeners as a grandmother who's had a wealth of life experience i've never um found god to be absent in trouble amen that he's present and that he's trustworthy amen amen thank you for being willing to turn the microphone on and record this i appreciate it it it will it encourages me as a younger man and uh it will encourage my listeners so thank you you're welcome sweet hop is an online marketplace curating the best in premium seating at stadiums arenas and amphitheaters nationwide with sweet hop's 100 ticket guarantee no hidden fees and the personal high-level service you expect with a premium purchase you 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