What Is Jinger Duggar's Husband's Job? How Jeremy Vuolo Affords To Live Large In LA
They moved to LA so he could go to grad school but they don't seem like starving students.
Getty Jinger Duggar Vuolo has been a fan favorite on her family's reality shows 19 Kids and Counting and Counting On. Audiences eagerly watched as the now-26-year-old grew up in front of the cameras, then met and married her husband Jeremy Vuolo. Fans were delighted when the couple had a baby in 2018.
In the years since she got married, Jinger has bucked some of the conservative traditions she grew up with and can be spotted on social media wearing pants — which were forbidden by her religious parents — and getting fancy highlights in her hair. She and her husband both appear to enjoy trips to major sporting events and other more material pleasures than Jinger was used to, growing up within a large and frugal family.
But fans also wonder how they afford their lifestyle, especially after relocating to Los Angeles in 2019 so Vuolo could attend seminary. Vuolo was a pastor before moving so speculation is their savings can't be that large, leading folkto wonder: What does Jinger Duggar's husband do for a living?
1. Who are Jeremy Vuolo and Jinger Duggar?
Jinger is the 6th child of Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar. She, along with the rest of her family, was on the TLC show 19 Kids And Counting, which chronicled the lives of a giant fundamentalist Christian family in Arkansas. She was on the show from its inception in 2008 until it was abruptly shut down in 2015 after revelations that her older brother Josh had sexually abused several girls, including several of Jinger's sisters. The family and the network rebranded the show and called it Counting On, with the updated series following the lives of the adult children as they got married and had families of their own.
Jeremy Vuolo is a former minor league soccer player-turned-pastor. He is currently 32 years old. He and Jinger met in 2015 and their courtship and wedding were filmed for the show. After they got married, she joined him in Texas, where he was the pastor at a church. They had their daughter Felicity together in 2018. In 2019, they moved out to LA so Vuolo could pursue a graduate degree. But their lifestyle on the West Coast seems a little nicer than most graduate students can afford.
The Vuolo's in Orlando in 2019.
2. What to they earn from being on TLC?
The obvious answer about how they make a living is that they're part of a wildly popular reality show. Surely that's where most of their moment comes from, right? Well, we're not so sure about that. Jinger's brother in law Derick Dillard let slip that the contract situation between the Duggar offspring and TLC isn't all that clear. In fact, from what Dillard says, it's possible that the kids don't have contracts with the network at all. It's possible that Duggar patriarch Jim Bob Duggar is the only one with the TLC contract. Moreover, according to Dillard, Jim Bob is the one who allegedly collected all the money from the contract and only gave it to the kids as he saw fit. They didn't get paid by TLC at all. Maybe Jim Bob is underwriting their LA lifestyle with profits from the show. But we'll probably never know that for sure since the family has been extremely tight-lipped about the money they make from the program.
3. Could Jeremy have made a ton of money as a soccer player?
Vuolo used to have a career as a professional soccer player. After graduating from college in 2010, he went to play for the Finnish First Division side AC Oulu. In January 2012, he signed with the New York Red Bulls. The team didn't re-sign him and he went on to make a trial appearance with Finnish club HJK Helsinki in 2013. By then, he was already planning to pursue full-time ministry but he stuck with soccer a little longer and signed a contract with the San Antonio Scorpions.
But minor league soccer, while personally fulfilling for the athletes, isn't a way to get rich. By one report, players only make about $35,000 per year.
4. Pastors make even less than minor league soccer players.
By the time Vuolo was courting Jinger, he was working as a pastor at a church in Texas. He met Jinger's sister Jessa and brother-in-law Ben and struck up a friendship with them. They introduced him to Jinger and the pair got to know each other when Vuolo joined the family on a church-related trip. Once they started courting, his income because an issue. Jim Bob Duggar sat him down and very directly asked him about his financial prospects. "Jeremy, being on the kind of modest pastor salary, when you get married, it's going to be a lot tighter, going from being a single guy to being a married guy, whenever that happens — I'm not saying anytime soon," Duggar said on the show. "But Jinger loves to go thrift shopping, and it's expensive. I was just curious about, financially and stuff."
Neither the Duggar dad or Vuolo suggested that Jinger could work. In their religion, men are typically the breadwinners and women tend to not work at all or do so from home-based enterprises like multi-level marketing companies or social media promotion.
5. Vuolo is now in grad school in Los Angeles.
In 2019, a few months after the birth of their daughter felicity in 2018, the couple announced that Vuolo had been accepted into the Master's Seminary in Los Angeles and they would be moving for him to pursue his education. Los Angeles seems to agree with them because their social media pages show lots of photos of them enjoying outings, wearing stylish clothes, and occasionally traveling back east to see family. One report even revealed that their rental home in LA is a 2,000-sq ft, four-bedroom, home that could have a monthly price tag as high as $4000. Neither of them mentions working to pay for their rent.
Jinger showed off freshly colored hair in 2019.
6. Are they earning money from social media?
The Vuolo's both use Cameo, a popular app where fans can pay to have their favorite stars record video messages for them. Jinger's messages go for $60 apiece and her husband's are $40. That might not seem like very much, but if they each make 8 videos per day, that's the same as them making a combined $100 per hour for 8 hours at a regular job. Over the course of a year, that could bring them over $200,000. Add to that whatever they could make as influencers on Instagram and any money they get from the show, and they might be able to live comfortably.
We may never know exactly what the Vuolo's earn or how.
Rebekah Kuschmider has been writing about celebrities, pop culture, entertainment, and politics since 2010. She is the creator of the blog FeminXer and she is a cohost of the weekly podcast The More Perfect Union.