‘Home Town’ Star Ben Napier Says His Family ‘Lost Everything Financially’ Two Different Times

Ben Napier is opening up about how watching his parents struggle financially when he was a child has impacted his life today.

The HGTV personality, 42, spoke candidly about the difficult days of his childhood during an appearance on Sadie Robertson Huff’s WHOA That’s Good Podcast, revealing in the Oct. 15 episode that his parents “lost everything financially” not once, but twice.

“I talk about this a lot with [wife Erin Napier] — and we talk about it a lot with other people — but growing up in my house when I was a little kid, my parents lost everything financially,” the Home Town star revealed.

Ben recalled his dad taking out what he called an “illegal loan” from the bank that ultimately caused the family’s finances to collapse twice.

“Up to that point, up until them losing everything, my dad, he was a big farmer. He had this weird bank loan situation that is actually an illegal loan — they can’t do them anymore,” Ben explained. “Anyway, he lost everything, and he rebuilt it all, and then he lost it all again.

Things got to the point where his parents only had “this old Datsun car because the bank said that car had no value,” so they allowed his father to keep it.

Watching his parents struggle time and time again gave Ben a different perspective on “heartache and loss” than he might have otherwise had. “My perspective on heartache and loss was from watching my parents lose and rebuild and start over, and then have a surprise baby late in life when they really, like as far as the world was concerned, they did not need that child,” said Ben, who is one of four sons in his family. “And he was, you know, a miracle situation.”

Looking back on all of the challenges his family faced when he was a child, Ben said he learned to “do the best you can and don’t worry about it, ’cause at the end of the day, everything’s going to be okay,” even though it “will be very hard” and “you will have very hard days.”