Help the Bennetts Get Back on Their Feet

Following a year of overwhelming medical expenses related to Lily's health, a tree limb fell and caused more than $10,000 of damage to our home and totaled Bryn's car. Two weeks later, a second limb fell. We had to pay $12,500 to have the tree removed to prevent more lost limbs and potential further damage. Unable to file a home insurance claim, in one month we have suffered roughly $23,000 of damages, with all repairs to be paid for out-of-pocket. We have essentially drained our entire savings in response to this recent storm damage and could use some help to get back on our feet.

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I want to start off by saying that, above all, we are grateful. There are so many people in the world facing so much hardship. In sharing our own hardship, by no means do we intend to diminish others'. In spite of our current circumstances, we are so lucky for our health and our safety, to own a home and to have the support of family and friends. Nonetheless, we've fallen on hard times and we could use some help.

In the last year, our daughter Lily had RSV, followed by one ear infection after another, and a bad bout of norovirus that led to two ER visits and ultimately being admitted to the hospital for dehydration and hypoglycemia. She had surgery for tubes to remedy the ear infections. She had some custom SMO orthotics made to correct a hip issue that was affecting her mobility. A few months later she developed a cough that just wouldn't go away and wound up back at Children's Mercy for chest x-rays. All that wonderful healthcare resulted in a healthy girl, but also thousands of dollars in medical expenses.

We've spent the last year trying to pay off medical bills. We've also been paying tuition toward a dual master's degree I've been working on because we thought taking steps to increase my salary might mean less financial stress in the long run despite dipping into our savings a bit now.

Then, May came, and with it, storms. And as they say - when it rains, it pours... and apparently also brings tornados with gusts of 110 mph winds. That wind brought a 75-foot long limb down onto our house and my car. That limb brought a few other big ones from another nearby tree down with it. Our chimney was sliced in half, our roof severely damaged, our gutters destroyed and my car totaled. The force of the limb hitting the ground shattered windows around our house and destroyed the landscaping and sidewalk in front of our house.

Quick flashback to February, 2023... In preparing to sell our first house we replaced the water heater. During the process, the plumber discovered water had been slowly leaking from our old water heater under our floorboards and into the crawl space. The crawl space had to be professionally dried and our kitchen floors had to be ripped up and replaced. We did what most homeowners would do in the face of severe water damage in their home and filed an insurance claim. It was the second claim we had filed since purchasing a house in 2018 after filing a claim for hail damage to our roof after a storm in 2021.

Because we had filed those two claims in three years in our previous home, we were informed that filing another claim for the recent storm damage would very likely result in being dropped by our insurance company and the chances of any other company providing us insurance very slim. We couldn't risk the cost of the lender-placed insurance that would come from losing our home insurance, so we were left to pay for the repairs from the storm damage out-of-pocket.

Arranging repairs has been stressful, to say the least. Part of the roof and gutters need to be replaced. We hoped the chimney wouldn't need much work because the fireplace hasn't actually been in working condition for quite some time. It turns out, though, our water heater vents through the chimney which means it either has to be rebuilt to a certain height to meet code, or we have to replace our current water heater with an electric one. Neither option is cheap.

Thankfully, car insurance did cover the loss of my car, but the removal of the limb and the repairs to our house have cost us around $10,000 out-of-pocket.

We've been devastated.

And then, this past Sunday brought more rain and our giant oak tree dropped another giant limb. We were informed that morning that the whole tree needed to come down immediately because other limbs were at risk of coming down and causing more damage to our house and also our neighbors'. The cost of taking the tree down after the $10,000 of damage it already caused? $12,500 (not including the cost of stump removal).

In 3 weeks, one tree has cost us $24,000. The storm damage we've suffered has essentially drained us of all of our savings, which we had already dipped into to pay off medical bills and make tuition payments. We've leaned on family to loan us what we don't have now and feel burdened by the desire to pay back what we've borrowed as soon as we can, with little left in our savings at all.

We have been so lucky to be both financially and emotionally supported by family and friends this past year. This experience has made me wonder how anyone is expected to own a home or raise a family without support from a village like the one we have.

It is going to take us years to make up what we've lost to medical expenses and the cost of the storm damage to our home this past year. We're doing everything we can to save the money we still have and make up what we've lost. I'm teaching summer school, tutoring in the evenings and on my days off and am in search of a second job to pick up in the evenings when school starts back up in August. We're scouring the house for valuables we can stomach to sell.

Despite our best efforts to make up for the expenses we've endured this year, we could use some help. Any donations we receive will go toward paying for the $24,000 of damage caused by the tree.

We promise to pay it forward once we're back on our feet and have the opportunity to help someone else who's down on their luck. We will also tell Lily about all the helpers (as Fred Rogers encourages us to look for in hard times) who got us through this tough time.