29 the bank accounts and personal assets and savings of many different members of my family and my friends. I had an uncle who was financially secure. He decided to help me because I had a long tradition of helping other members of our family. I hadn’t loaned or given him any money. However, he had witnessed me be generous and help family and friends. He said, “Okay, she took care of us, so I will take care of her.” Those personal loans and gifts and the help from my uncle actually kept me alive. It was the one source of money that the government could never shut off and they tried. They made threatening phone calls to my uncle and showed up at his door in the middle of the night with a subpoena. I was lucky. My uncle was a strong, principled man. The smear and scare tactics did not work. When I finished the litigation and became an investment advisor, one of the things that I noticed looking at clients’ portfolios and financial statements was that they were working hard to fill up their 401(k)s and IRAs. At the same time, they were not spending sufficient amounts of money on their preventative health care or healthy food – or they weren’t helping their kids buy homes, or reinvesting money in their skills and business. They were starving their family and their busi- nesses of sound investment. This was all on the theory that they had to put more money into their 401(k) and IRAs. What they didn’t understand was that they had been trained to suck up all of the money they needed for their family, for their health, for their community, and, turn it over to large corporations to finance the national security state. When I settled the litigation, I took the $500,000 that my CPA wanted to put into my 401(k) and repaid and gifted it to the people who helped me survive and succeed. I was convinced that the friendly folks at the DOJ were going to arrange for the IRS to go after me. I knew that if the mon- ey were in my “community bank,” there would be less to go after. The thing that kept me alive was personal loans and gifts and the people who helped me at great personal risk. I had loaned and gifted $250,000, and that was what came back albeit not necessarily from the same people; it wasn’t tit-for-tat. It was like the Great Mandala; you put it out, and it comes back around. I put that $500,000 back out in the “community bank” and I am confident that it is coming back around. Healthcare I told the story of my health care saga in a com- mentary called “Musings on Health, Health Care and Health Insurance. ” I came to the realization during the litigation period that I could not depend on the traditional healthcare system. It was increasingly unproduc- tive or unsafe for someone in my circumstance. I also concluded that if I continued to pay for healthcare insurance, I would not be able to afford healthcare. In fact, I didn’t need healthcare insurance; I needed healthcare. This started me on a journey of discovering highly economic and practical natural alternatives. During this period I visited the original home- stead of my family when they came to Tennessee four generations ago. It was a log cabin with a dirt floor and no windows – with no heat and no running water. Ten people had lived there for the first winter in Tennessee in the 1850’s. I realized that my ancestors had long lives for thousands of years without healthcare insur- ance, without pensions and without disability insurance – all of the things that, as a successful professional person, I thought I needed. Somehow standing inside the log cabin broke the trance. From then on I focused my health care dollars on good nutrition and caring for my own health as much as possible. I became much more adept at navigating the traditional systems when I needed to access the wonders of modern medicine. As described in the commentary, this approach turned out to be the right one for me. My Pension Fund I had a pension fund from my career on Wall Street. Occasionally as I was organizing my The Solari one troy ounce Silver Coin.