Jinger Duggar and her husband, Jeremy Vuolo, made a point to avoid financial drama during their time starring on TLC’s Counting On.
“We chose not to make money an issue because once you mix money and family, things get complicated real fast,” Vuolo, 36, explained on the Wednesday, June 12, episode of the “Unplanned” podcast. “We understood there was issues with the money, the show was making a ton of money, but Jinger and I just both determined, ‘We’re not gonna make this an issue. Even though this might be a hill we can fight on, we’re just not gonna fight on that hill.’”
Duggar, 30, went on to note, “At the end of the day, it was like, ‘OK, we’ll just do our own thing, make our own money somehow.’”
The couple, who wed in 2016, starred on the 19 Kids and Counting spinoff from 2015 to 2020. The reality series followed Jinger and several of the older Duggar siblings as they reached major life milestones such as marriage and becoming parents. The series was canceled in 2021 in the wake of Josh Duggar’s child pornography scandal. (Josh, 36, was charged with two counts of receiving and possessing child pornography in December 2021 and was sentenced to a little over 12 years in prison.)
Vuolo shared that both he and Jinger “saw bigger issues” than money when it came to their roles on Counting On. “The root of the issue was deeper and more theological, and Jinger had a conviction, ‘I want to speak to the deeper issues, and I don’t want the others to get in the way of my voice on that,’” he shared.
Jinger, for her part, stated that her “drive” was to help her family members overcome their struggles with faith as she herself began to deviate from some of their religion’s stricter rules like choosing to wear pants.
“I thought, ‘I want to be in a place where I can still talk to them and still be in their lives. I don’t want to be [alienated],’” she shared. “’I don’t want to make unwise decisions to where it would be tough to do that later.’”
At the end of the day, Jinger said she and Vuolo agreed to “make sure that whatever we were doing, that we would be living as we wanted to as a couple,” adding, “And then from there, my goal is just to reach my friends and loved ones to pull them out.”
The Duggar family’s ties to the Institute in Basic Life Principles (IBLP) church were explored in the 2023 Prime Video docuseries Shiny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets. Among the series’ revelations, Jinger’s older sister Jill Duggar claimed that she and her siblings never received any of their earnings from 19 Kids and Counting or Counting On.
“No check, no cash, no nothing. For seven and a half years of my adult life, I was never paid,” she alleged, noting that her father, Jim Bob Duggar, earned the profits as the network paid the family. “We were taken advantage of.” (Jim Bob, 58, and Amy Duggar previously slammed the series for being “derogatory and sensationalized” in a statement ahead of its release.)
Jinger and Vuolo were not involved in the docuseries. She explained to People in June 2023 that she instead wanted to share her experience “in my own words and in my own timing” through her book Becoming Free Indeed, which was released earlier that year. “I wanted to be able to share it in a way that was, like, God-honoring and hopefully sharing my story in a balanced way,” she added.
