I'm back, and today we're going to do a fun one. No technical financial planning here today. We're just going to talk about minivans and why I believe that your next car should be a minivan, no matter who you are. Welcome to the Radical Personal Finance Podcast. My name is Joshua Sheets, and I'm your host.

Thank you for being with me. Happy to be back after a few weeks away from the microphone. I missed you guys. I needed a break. It was a much needed break, but I did miss you. I didn't want to be away that long, but at the end of the day, I needed the break.

Today, I'm back, excited, energetic, and enthusiastic. I think you'll like this one. I do welcome you to the show. This is the show where I'm dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.

We've had a lot of great feedback on those past few episodes that we did on the three-part series discussing the details on that three-part series that is explaining that tagline. Last show, how to become financially free in 10 years or less, many of you have gotten great feedback that many of you enjoyed that.

It's been quite popular, so thank you for that. We'll continue to flesh these concepts out and get them into a more actionable form for you than just a podcast. Today, we're going to do something fun and talk about minivans. This is a subject that's near and dear to my heart.

In fact, just this weekend, I was with a friend of mine. They have one child and we were talking about vehicles and they were saying, "Well, we don't really like our current car." I said, "What are you thinking about buying?" They weren't thinking about buying a minivan. Now, of course, in personal relationships, I can't necessarily hop up and down and beat people on the head and say, "Listen, you've got to buy a minivan." That doesn't work very well, but in my podcast, I can.

Here's the case that I'm going to make to you. I believe that each and every one of you should consider, if you don't currently own one, should consider buying a minivan as your next vehicle. I'm saying that with very few qualifications. I will, at the end of the show, get to a couple of the exceptions and talk about some of the exceptions to that, but we're going to start off with a very strong and powerful case for minivans.

I love my minivan. I think that if you could get one, you would love it too. Today, I'm going to try to give you the ammunition you need. If nothing else, this show will sit here as a resource that the next time I'm having a conversation with a friend of mine who's not considering buying a minivan for some silly reason, I could just point them to this show.

Before I get into the bulk of the content, two quick things. Sponsors of the day number one is me, myself. Back from vacation, and I've got some time in the coming weeks. Would you like to have some input from me on any particular financial question that you have? Well, I've set up a consulting program where you can actually consult directly with me.

This will work through a phone call system. All the details can be found at RadicalPersonalFinance.com/phonecall, but if you'd like my input on your situation, you can book that call with me. The way it works is there's a software system that's set up. It'll bill you by the minute for the discussion, but I'll show up.

I'll be happy to read anything in advance that you'd like me to read, an email from you or information. I'll show up. I'll take notes and ask you some questions about your situation, try to help you. The feedback so far has been fantastic. So if you'd like to talk to me about a personal financial planning problem or personal financial discussion, please go to RadicalPersonalFinance.com/phonecall and book a call.

Now let's talk about minivans. I am fully aware that many people object to minivans on the basis of their style. I'm fully aware that many people don't want to drive a mom mobile. I get that. But this objection is... I'm so tempted to be over the top. I have in my notes here, this is so fundamentally silly that it seems like we should hardly need to deal with it.

Now, at the end of the day, I know that's probably a little bit too strong. So let's just say this objection I think is so insignificant compared to the many advantages of minivans that I really think you should consider getting over it. But we'll come back to that and deal with it in a moment.

I want to start with just a few of the features and benefits because I think that not only can a minivan serve as a really compelling financial choice for you, I'm going to defend that to you today, but it can also result and it can also serve as a really compelling lifestyle choice.

To me, that's the biggest benefit of minivan is a lifestyle choice. I think it's probably not the cheapest way to operate a vehicle. But from a lifestyle perspective, it has so many benefits that when you actually incorporate those things, it makes a really, really strong case. Now, a few of the features and benefits of a minivan are really, really simple.

Let's buzz through them. Number one, big one, you get a ton of usable seats. I recommend if you're shopping for one, do your best to get an eight-seater. What that means is that you and seven of your friends can travel your town or travel your country in air-conditioned comfort.

The seats on these minivans are fantastic. They're really, really comfortable. They've got tons of space. The great thing about a minivan, unlike any SUVs, is that when you actually have people with you, you still have a ton of cargo space. If you've not ridden recently in a modern minivan, and by modern minivan, I'm talking newer models of Honda Odyssey, Toyota Sienna, Hyundai Entourage, Kia Sedona, or the Dodge Chrysler Town & Country version, Caravan, etc.

If you've not been in one of these recently, do yourself a favor and rent one and use it for a few days before you do something else. Many times when people are considering a larger car, they're moving up from a smaller car and they know they need a little bit of space.

The biggest thing I want to point off is to help people to head away from SUVs in this context and help you to move towards a minivan. I'm going to be primarily referencing the difference here between SUVs and minivans, but I even still think that a good comparison can be made between cars and minivans as well.

I'm going to get to that in a moment. A minivan has so much more space than even the largest of SUVs and most people just simply are not aware of it. Let me give you some actual numbers. 2016 Toyota Sienna has 150 cubic feet of cargo space behind the front seats.

150 cubic feet of cargo space behind the front seats. Let's compare that to the two largest SUVs that are on the market right now. A 2016 Ford Expedition EL, that's their extra long, the big one, that when they got rid of the Excursion, they added on this Ford Expedition EL.

They added this on, it's got 130.8 cubic feet of space behind the front seats, 20 feet less than the Toyota Sienna. A 2016 Chevrolet Suburban has 121.7 cubic feet of space behind the front seats. So a minivan, standard everyday issue minivan has more usable cargo space and interior space behind the front seats than the largest SUVs on the market.

By the way, I should have mentioned earlier, I've owned cars. I've owned a Honda Accord. I've owned a Ford Escape. I've owned a Ford Expedition. Very happy days of my life was when they got rid of the Expedition and transitioned it to a minivan. So I come from experience.

Been through it from experience. What most people don't realize is that this usable space in a vehicle of a modern minivan is so much better because of the simple design. For example, something like a Toyota Sienna or a Honda Odyssey or my Hyundai Entourage, the cargo space is lower and you get way better access to it from the sides and from the rear.

When I used to have the Expedition, one of the biggest problems with SUVs and their fundamental construction is that their back row seats only open out. They only open out with the traditional car seats. A minivan, you have these giant sliding doors that open back. This is a big deal when you're loading cargo in and out.

This is a big deal when you're trying to access anything that you have in the back. And it's a big deal when you're trying to work with kids and kids in car seats. If you have kids, I mean, that should be a huge incentive for you. But even if you don't, this is still really useful.

On a minivan, you open up both sides, sliding cargo doors on either side. You open up the back hatch, you have a very low load floor. You have a really high ceiling. You've got fantastic access to the cargo. So not only is there more space, but it's much more useful.

The full-size back hatch on a minivan is more useful in terms of things like rain coverage. There have been tons of times from out on a minivan and we use our vehicle. That's one of the things that I think you should have a vehicle that you use. So you take it out.

You take it to the beach or you take it out to a picnic. Starts raining, you can pop up the back hatch and you can have a party of six people, two people sitting in the back of the vehicle and two or three sitting there underneath the hatch. Now one of the best ways to use a minivan is if you're only using a few of the seats.

So if you only use that middle bench row, you wind up with a fantastic five-seat car, two front seats and three seats in the middle bench row and you have a massive cargo space in the back, which is really, really useful. Now I don't think that you necessarily always have to upgrade your vehicle just when you need some cargo space.

There are lots of great ways to do it. As a simple example, one of our vehicles, I have an old 1998 Toyota Corolla that I bought for $500. A few months ago, our minivan was in the shop and so we wound up driving this Corolla for a couple of weeks.

I took my family of four people, two dogs, two adults in the front, two kids in car seats in the back, two dogs. We don't have small dogs. They're not huge but they're about – one's about 50-pound dogs and two dogs in this tiny little Corolla with two paddle boards strapped to the roof.

So you can do it. But man, is it a lot more comfortable in a minivan. And just this cargo space opens up the possibilities. A simple thing, talking about the paddle boards, I carry our paddle boards in the vehicle. Instead of having to deal with the hassle of strapping them on the roof, suffering poor fuel economy for that, I just pop the back seats down.

Our middle seat is captain's chairs. I slide them right up through the front of the vehicle and you have access to it. I carry grills and smokers and all kinds of things to all kinds of events and it's so nice to be able to have all of that space.

One of the reasons why the space is important for us and one of the reasons why I carry a lot of things in different places is even for the perspective of entertaining. When we sold our house, we wound up moving into a smaller apartment and the smaller apartment is not quite as conducive to entertaining lots of people as our larger house was.

But I'm not willing to give up on entertaining people. So what I just do is take the show on the road. Have a griddle. I have a Camp Chef stove, a big three-burner stove that comes with this big, long, about 30-inch griddle on the top. I can cook 30 pancakes at a time.

I have tons of chairs and coolers and things like that. Load the smoker. A friend of mine, a listener of the show, gave me a pit barrel cooker, a smoker. I can load that in the back. Load all the stuff up in there and then I can take the party on the road and we can have tons of big events but it's not at my house.

We just go down to the beach and do it at the beach or do it at a local park, things like that. It's cheaper than owning a big old house but I still get one of the major benefits of the house which is the entertaining. So this cargo room is really, really valuable.

My wife loves the minivan because she can stop and pick up things off the side of the road. We're driving through a place and pick up a free bed or she's gotten a free rocking chair. We have a rocking chair in our living room that's probably the kind you'd pay 200 bucks for, a cracker barrel.

She found it on the side of the road but by having the capacity to just toss it in the car. We were out looking at houses and looking for rental houses and kind of driving the neighborhoods and seeing what the neighborhoods were that we wanted to possibly purchase a rental house in.

We found a table on the side of the road. Pop that thing up on the roof. It's a 10-foot long table. It's in our dining room now. So having this space opens up tons of options for you. It's not just about where do you strap a car seat. It's much more about just having room to move in and we'll come back to that in a moment because we need to take travel and you talk about the ways that you can travel and the ways that you can move and you can camp and you can use.

It's so nice to have that space. Many vans are awesome because they're really, really drivable. They're very easy to drive and they're very comfortable to drive because of the design. The modern unibody construction is built around drivability. It's much more drivable, much more comfortable on the road than the traditional which is much stronger, the traditional body on frame construction of the larger SUVs that they still use.

The smaller SUVs use the unibody construction as well. But minivans are much more solid and enjoyable to drive on the highway than a smaller car. They're about 4,000 to 5,000 pounds, about 4,400 pounds and so they're much more stable, much more comfortable in high winds and high speeds and speeds in small cars.

But they're much more drivable than SUVs are. For example, 2016 Toyota Sienna has a 37.5-foot turning radius. You could compare that very favorably to a big SUV, a 2016 Ford Expedition EL, again the big one, has a 43.9-foot turning radius. So you have about a seven-foot advantage. That makes a big difference when you're pulling into parking spaces and doing U-turns, things like that.

But it even compares more favorably than a small SUV. Remember, the Sienna has 37.5-foot turning radius. A 2016 Ford Escape has a 38.8-foot turning radius. So you have this tiny little Escape, used to own an Escape, I've used it a lot, I think it's a useful vehicle, but you have this little tiny Escape versus this minivan.

The minivan has better turning radius. What about fuel mileage? Well, a Sienna is rated for 18 miles per gallon in the city, 25 miles per gallon on the highway. That same Expedition EL, 15 miles per gallon in the city, 21 on the highway. Now, here's where something like a small SUV would come out ahead.

2016 Escape, 23.32. So you have a little bit of an advantage there in fuel mileage from an Escape over a Sienna. And that does make a difference. You do need to calculate the actual amount that you drive because, and it's one of my exceptions, if you are a real road warrior, you're really putting on thousands and thousands of miles, then the fuel mileage will make a difference and you should calculate that.

But for many people, the offsetting value and the ability to have a vehicle for a long time, meaning that you buy a minivan and you keep it for a longer period of time because it fits as a family grows, you get dogs, you get stuff, you're moving stuff, you'll make up for the fuel mileage from that perspective.

One thing that's just great about modern vehicles is they're powerful. A 2016 Sienna has 266 horsepower. I like to compare that. Now, certainly you can get lots of vehicles that are far more powerful than that, but I like to go back and compare it historically. A 1995 Ford F-350, one ton pickup truck with the biggest V8 they offer, 7.5 liter V8, that vehicle came from the factory with 245 horsepower, 20 horsepower less than a modern 2016 Toyota Sienna with a V6.

These vehicles are powerful. They're cheap to buy. They're cheap to insure. Many vans have a great insurance cost compared to others because they're generally driven by people who are parents who are probably a little bit more stable. They're cheaper to maintain because there's so many of them out there.

There's tons and tons of benefits to them, especially as compared to an SUV. From a lifestyle perspective, you'll get far more use and utility from a minivan over an SUV. I've owned both. I've used both. I promise you'll get more utility. Now, I think one of the major benefits of a minivan and why I can so confidently state in the title of this show that your next car should be a minivan no matter who you are is simply because they're appropriate at every stage of life.

I think that people forget about how valuable it is to have one vehicle for a long period of time. The process of buying and selling vehicles is generally extremely inefficient for most people. Now, there are some of you who are quite radical and I love the fact that you do it who will go out and you buy an old car and you'll fix it up and you'll own it and drive it for a year and then sell it and sell it for more than you pay for.

I think that's awesome. There are some of you who will be able to make money on your cars through that process. I have a family member who's a car dealer and he makes money on every car he drives, just drives for free. You could do that on a little space.

For example, some of you, a good part-time business should get your auto dealer license and go and buy a couple of cars and sell them out of the front yard. You can do that, but most people don't and most people aren't going to. It's not a skill set that I'm particularly interested in working with right now.

The process of buying and selling vehicles is very expensive. The friction, the cost of finding a good one, the cost of inspections if you're buying a used one, the cost of taxes. In the state of Florida, we pay sales tax on a vehicle. There's a 6% cost every time you will go and register a vehicle.

The process of changing titling and things like that. There are always transaction costs that have to be accounted for. The other thing is the cost of depreciation. Many people, when they're consistently upgrading vehicles, and this is what most US Americans do, is they're consistently upgrading their vehicle every few years.

They're often driving a vehicle at the most expensive part of the curve of depreciation. They're moving up and they're buying a $20,000 vehicle and if your $20,000 vehicle is depreciating at 15%, you're losing $3,000 that year on the cost of depreciation. If your $20,000 vehicle becomes a $10,000 vehicle after about three, four, five years and you turn around and sell a vehicle for $10,000, you trade up again to a $20,000, you're always operating that vehicle in a very expensive part of the depreciation curve.

That adds up. Especially when you add on those friction costs of changing ownership, that adds up. Also when you add on the cost when you buy a vehicle, and again for a moment I'm assuming you're buying a used one, you buy a used vehicle, what do you need to do?

You need to do a tune-up. You need to make sure that all the maintenance was done. You change the oil, you change the belt, you change the hoses, you change all this stuff. In a modern world where the average vehicle can easily go 200,000 miles with minimal repairs, and many of them can go much beyond that, there's no need to constantly be trading out your vehicle every three or four years except for lifestyle changes.

This is often what happens. Many people start looking at a minivan when they are thinking about when they have kids or they go from one kid to two kids. I'll tell you, putting kids in and out of car seats of a little Toyota Corolla is a pain. I do it.

It's a pain. So people start looking around and then all of a sudden you start trading up. This trading process is very, very expensive both because of the depreciation curve and because of the friction of buying and selling. So I recommend to you that in order to stem the financial outflow, in order to stop hemorrhaging money from your life with vehicles, it's good to buy a vehicle that's going to serve you for a long time and own it for a long time.

Even if some of you buy a new vehicle. I was doing a consulting call with somebody recently on the phone line, radicalpersonalfinance.com/phonecall. They were asking, they had bought some new vehicles, they were a few years old, and they were asking, "Do you think that we should sell them?" They were trying to get out of debt.

They said, "Do you think we should sell our vehicles?" I asked about the vehicles and number one, "Do you like the vehicles?" "Yes, we like them." Number two, "What type of vehicles are they?" They were vehicles that could fit their lifestyle for a long period of time. I said, "Your best thing at this point in time is just to keep them.

If you've bought a new car, that's done. Now you got to make a fresh decision. You bought a new car. Now you've owned it from the factory. Hopefully you've stayed current on all of your maintenance costs and things like that. You know what's gone on with the vehicle. You know it wasn't buried in water in Hurricane Sandy.

You know that it's been cared for." Well, in that case, in order to minimize the cost, just keep the vehicle for a very long period of time. If you can own a vehicle for 20 years, your cost of depreciation becomes a very small cost as compared to everything else.

If you keep a vehicle for a short period of time, depreciation is a much bigger expense that you've got to plan for. When you're thinking about how do I set myself up logically, buy a vehicle that you're going to own for a long period of time. I think a minivan is the perfect vehicle for high school students to drive.

I really do. I think a minivan is, if you're working with your high school student or if you are a high school student, you should look into buying a minivan. Why? Well, first of all, in high school, if you're driving in high school, many of your friends don't have driver's license.

How great is it to have a vehicle where you can eight-seat minivan, you can load up seven of your friends and travel around with them? How cool is that? You're the most popular person around. You can move people instead of only being able to fit two or three people into your little tiny car.

Minivans are great because they can be filled up with stuff and used for adventures. To me, one of the biggest benefits and I see people, the first inclination that people make when they're young is buy a little car. Little car is good for gas mileage, but truly, how much do you actually commute?

Are you really putting 20,000 miles a year on a car, on a little car? Most people aren't versus using it. You give me a minivan, I'll load up four or five of my friends and we got massive space in the back for stuff to take a great trip, stuff to go take adventures with going rock climbing or going surfing or going traveling and we need a place for tents and coolers and all that stuff.

That cargo space is really useful. A high school student, you get a minivan, you can fill it up with stuff for your adventures. The great thing is minivans get the best safety ratings. Now, there are other vehicles that get the best safety ratings as well, but you get the benefit of having a large vehicle.

Many people want a large vehicle. They want to put their high school student in a tiny little car. You get the benefit of a large vehicle. It has five-star safety ratings across the board, most of them. It's not built for hot-rodding. It's not a muscle car. It avoids many of those problems.

It's much safer than an SUV in terms of the likelihood of it being flipped on the highway. It has a lower center of gravity. It's just a much safer vehicle. They get great safety ratings, perfect for high school students. What about college students and young adults? I think a minivan is the perfect vehicle for a young adult or college student because one of the features of this stage of life is often a lot of moving.

Minivan not only works for all those things that I just said for a high school student like taking your friends around, but it works great for moving. You can pack that thing full. Lower the seats, all flattened to the floor. You have a huge amount of cargo space. You can move easily and transition.

Works really, really well for all those adventures. One of the great things about a minivan is that you can easily, very, very comfortably camp in the back of it while you're traveling. I've camped in the back of, let's see, a Ford Escape, Ford Expedition, minivan, Hyundai Entourage, and also Toyota Prius.

Those are the four different types of cars that I've actually camped in the back of. Of all of them, minivan is definitely the most comfortable. Well, let's say that you're a young person and you're into traveling. You just toss a mattress or a mattress pad in the back of the thing and you've got tons of room for stuff slid up against the side.

You've got a great place to be in out of the weather. You need air conditioning. You just run the air conditioning. I've calculated it out. It probably costs you about, depending on the vehicle, it costs you about maybe six bucks of fuel to run the AC all night on the vehicle.

It's a lot cheaper than a hotel stay. Pull over on the side of the road and camp in the back of it. Just from the perspective of adventures and the ability to go and to do and to travel and to experience many of the things of life, a minivan is the perfect road trip vehicle.

You can take more people. You can always add in more people. You can easily put two. I've seen it one time. We did a – one time, it was one of the last flights of the space shuttle. This was one of the first times I was pretty young. We decided to go up to Cape Canaveral and watch the space shuttle take off.

I rigged up the minivan to sleep a bunch of my friends and took out all the seats, popped the other seats forward, laid out a bunch of foam padding on the back and I think that – I can't remember. I think three or four – we had three or four girls that went in there and slept in there.

It worked great, super comfortable. One of the best features – oh, also, on this perspective, things like work. Minivans are great work vehicles. They can easily be used to carry tools. They can easily be used to carry people. Minivans are perfect work vehicles. I look at a lot of tradesmen and people around me and I know it's the same in the rest of the country.

Many, many tradesmen, the standard answer is to drive a pickup truck. A pickup truck, unless you need the open back for hauling and unless you need the weight ratings of the vehicle, the ability to really load it up, pickup truck is the worst vehicle ever. All of your stuff is exposed to the weather.

It's crazy inefficient and you have no good place to put tools. You got a pickup truck and what's the thing? You put this toolbox. You got the toolbox in the back. You put this stupid aluminum toolbox in the back that has very little actual cargo space for your tools.

Get a minivan and strap down a couple of nice toolboxes in the back. You get a low load floor. You get much easier to get in and out of, much easier to haul things, much more practical unless you need the weight ratings, which I'll get back to. I'm a realist.

Some people do need the weight ratings. So minivans are great for work, for work vehicles. This can be really, really useful, especially for somebody like a college student or somebody who's living a more transient lifestyle. You may be able to use the cargo capacity of your vehicle to actually store your stuff in.

For example, one of the things that I would do if I were in that phase of life is I would minimize my living expenses and I would try to store things like my tools or some of my gear in the actual vehicle. That way I don't have to spend quite so much on having a storage place for it.

Super useful. Now, one of the other great things about it at this stage of life, most people who are going through this stage of life are interested in attracting a potential spouse. Minivan is the perfect vehicle for you to drive because it helps weed out all the undesirable spouses.

If you're a young man, minivan is the perfect vehicle for you to drive because it weeds out all the undesirable women who are just looking for somebody who's flashy and sporty and trying to figure out and say, "Well, where's the guy that drives the nicest car?" That type of approach will help you to find somebody who is a little bit more practical and who appreciates somebody who values thriftiness and practicality and who's family-oriented and who's using their equipment for adventure.

Somebody who doesn't recognize the fact that you're frugal and you're careful and you're wise with your expenditure, somebody who's just looking at admiring the flashiness of your presentation with a muscle car or whatever your thing is, that's often a difficult person to satisfy down the road. Same exact thing goes the other way.

Minivans would be a great vehicle for a young woman to drive because it conveys the right message to a young man about an orientation towards intelligent, thoughtful planning, an orientation towards family, towards practicality instead of an orientation towards flash and consumption. Talk to people who've been married a little while and all of a sudden you find that some of these deeper character qualities make a much bigger difference in your relational happiness over the long term.

Much better to be in a relationship with somebody who values the same things as you than to be in a relationship with somebody who's looking for something that you don't want to provide. If you are interested and you're trying to portray a high status, high consumption lifestyle and put yourself out there as, "Look, notice me because I drive this beautiful fancy new sports car," go for it, but you're not listening to the show.

That type of person generally wouldn't even click on the title of this. But when you get to something like, "Hey, I'm building financial independence," or, "I'm trying to save money to invest and I'm trying to be practical and wise with my money so that I can pursue financial freedom so that I can have money to invest in my lifestyle and the things that matter," having a vehicle whose sex appeal is limited is probably a good way to weed somebody out.

I had no problem going and driving a sweet car with my wife. I think it's fun. You know, borrow a Corvette from somebody or rent a fun car and go and take it out. That's awesome. That's fun for an experience. But if my wife expected that on a daily basis, that would be really, really stressful.

It'd be really stressful to our finances. So consider a minivan as the ideal vehicle to drive because of how it portrays you as an intelligent, thoughtful person. Now with the 20% of the audience that I still have listening to this show, let's talk about other stages of life, families with kids.

Now, this is obviously where minivans are tailor-made for. A minivan is perfect because it allows you to have a great place for your kids and all of their stuff and it's so, so useful. It's amazing the amount of stuff that we wind up having for kids and it's really, really incredible.

I don't need to labor on this point simply because most of you are aware of that. But if you are a parent and you haven't at least tried a minivan, when you think about the practicality of vehicles, they are really, really useful. But I think even for people who are older people without children, a minivan is perfect for older people.

It's easy to get in and out of. It has a low load floor. It's useful. It's comfortable. So basically, my point with these life stages is simply that a minivan is one of the most useful vehicles that you can have for a very long time. When I think about vehicles, I primarily think in terms of function and in terms of how does this complement my fleet.

What does this do? A minivan, I think, is the most versatile, most useful vehicle for most people in their fleet because it does something that crosses all the boundaries. It's useful in many, many situations. When we were moving about a year ago, I used the minivan as a – I was hauling a trailer with it.

I also used the minivan for all of the interior capacity and I used the minivan for its roof. That's the kind of thing that you can't do with a car. I had lots of weather-protected interior space. I had the entire thing full because I was cleaning out the old house and it was things I hadn't yet dealt with.

So I had the entire interior of the vehicle full. I had a big trailer loaded on the back that was also full and again, stuff strapped all over the roof. Now, it looked a little bit unsightly. It looked a little bit like I was moving but I was moving and it was useful.

Then once you get all that stuff cleared out, you load up the family and you have useful – it's a useful vehicle, very, very useful. Now what are the exceptions to this? Who should consider not getting a minivan? Well, if you're a serious, serious road warrior and the bulk of your miles are just a commuting miles, then I think you should seriously consider getting something that's much more fuel-efficient.

In that case, you should buy a Toyota Prius. That shows for another day. I'm convinced it's the best vehicle all around, economical to drive, economical to own, incredibly useful. It bears – by the way, the reason it's so useful is because it has some of the attributes of a minivan, the ability to fold down the seats, the ability to have lots of cargo space.

You can tow a small trailer if you need to. It wrecks your gas mileage but it's – and it's economical to own. It gets great safety ratings, et cetera. So Prius, we'll save that lecture for another day. If you need to buy a car, you should seriously consider buying a Prius.

They're fantastic and because they're basically ubiquitous at this point, there's a good selection of them out there. There's a good infrastructure for parts and repairs. They're – across all of the ratings, they're incredibly reliable. They're incredibly well-built. There's my sales pitch on Prius. But if you're a serious road warrior, you should consider something more fuel-efficient.

For many people, the actual cost of driving, the actual fuel mileage is not the biggest factor. It is a factor but it's not the biggest factor. Let's do some quick math. 10,000 miles driven and let's say that you're going to have a difference of 5 miles per gallon in your calculation.

So you're looking at a vehicle and one vehicle gets you 5 miles per gallon more. So an example here would be the difference between an Escape and a minivan. So 10,000 miles divided by 5 is – all right. We got to do it the long way. So 10,000 miles driven divided by 25 miles per gallon means you're going to put 400 gallons of fuel into a vehicle.

10,000 miles driven by 500 gallon divided by – excuse me, divided by 20 miles per gallon means you're going to put 500 gallons of fuel into a vehicle. So the difference between 20 miles per gallon and 25 miles per gallon of cumulative driving is 100 gallons of fuel. Now the 100 gallons of fuel, let's say you're paying $2.50 per gallon, is going to be $250.

So there will be an increase of cost of $250. However, calculate out the cost of the insurance. Many vans really shine compared to many vehicles because of the lower cost of insurance. Calculate out the cost of maintenance. For example, if you buy a four-wheel drive SUV or pickup truck or let's say you buy something with a diesel, you're going to have higher maintenance cost.

$250 disappears pretty quickly there. Calculate out the cost of depreciation. If you can own one vehicle and you can avoid a $3,000 – instead of buying a $20,000 vehicle and upgrading continually like I said in the upgrade cycle and experiencing that $3,000 drop in depreciation by paying an extra $250 for fuel, you can work – these things can work out much better.

So my point is not to say that you shouldn't consider fuel economy but simply to say that you should factor it into everything else. So if you are a serious, serious road warrior, you should consider owning something else. If you already have a minivan, it wouldn't generally make sense to buy another one.

Only there is where you should get a more fuel-efficient vehicle. I love fuel efficiency but when I put onto – even when I talked about those earlier life stages, high school student, you're a college student, young adult, when you have a vehicle that you can take on the road and you can pull over on the side of the road and for the cost of $6 of fuel, idling the vehicle and having air conditioning all night, you can avoid a $50 hotel stay.

All of a sudden now, it becomes much more compelling to have that capability than the fuel-efficient vehicle. But if you already have that capability in a minivan in your family, then you should consider going ahead and getting a more fuel-efficient vehicle. People who shouldn't consider getting a minivan, if you have more kids than can fit in a minivan, you should probably trade up.

That's fairly obvious. I mean it's five or six kids. If you have more than five or six kids, time to trade up. If you need a high clearance vehicle and this is where minivans don't do so well, some people have a legitimate need for a high clearance, high ground clearance, actual four-wheel drive vehicle.

In that situation, you live at the top of a mountain on an unimproved road and you get snow and you've got to get up the mountain in the snow. So you need an actual legitimate four-wheel drive and high ground clearance. Well, in that situation, you need to go to an SUV.

An SUV is going to be able to deliver that. A minivan can't. You can get an all-wheel drive minivan, although most people I don't think it's generally necessary. I don't live in the north but from all of my research, it would indicate that the tires that you have on your vehicle are a far bigger deal than your all-wheel drive nature of a vehicle.

Better to have a two-wheel drive vehicle that has great tires than have an all-wheel drive vehicle that doesn't have great tires. Tires are what help you stop. All-wheel drive only helps you go. In most situations, the need for the all-wheel drive could probably be avoided by many people. Now, obviously there are exceptions to that but that's been at least my research.

But you can't get an all-wheel drive minivan. The Sienna offers it. If you need a higher weight rating than a minivan can handle, then that's where you're definitely going to need to move up to something different. Whether that's because you're hauling heavy cargo, whether that's because you're hauling lots of people, this is where tradespeople, when you have heavy tools and heavy equipment comes into play.

Then also, if you need to tow a bigger trailer, then that's where you need to move up from a minivan. However, I think you'd be surprised. Generally, the minivans are rated to tow a trailer of about 3,500 pounds with a tongue weighting usually around 400 pounds of tongue weighting.

You can haul a lot of trailers that are under 3,500 pounds. You can haul a small boat. You can haul something like a small pop-up camping trailer. They make these ultra-light, small, non-pop-up camping trailers that can be hauled. They're under 3,500 pounds. You can haul a landscaping trailer. Instead of having a pickup truck, my dad always just had a trailer.

Far more useful to have a trailer than a pickup truck. You do all the same things that a pickup truck can do but you can lend it to your friends much more easily. You don't have to pay for an extra drive train. You just buy the thing. Yes, you got to pay for an extra tag but it's a lot less hassle to have an extra trailer around than a pickup truck.

You can hook the trailer up to the minivan. You can hook the trailer up to a larger van, even to some cars and it's very, very useful. Plus trailer is much more practical than a pickup truck for loading. You get a much lower load floor. You get an actual so it's easier to get stuff into it.

You get an actual ramp. It's just all around superior to a pickup truck when it actually comes to carrying cargo. If you need to tow a bigger trailer and you need to tow a lot of people, then you should consider an SUV. However, at that point in time, you probably still shouldn't consider an SUV unless you need really great 4x4 high ground clearance because a full-size van is going to be a better solution for you in that situation than is an SUV.

I don't hate SUVs. I just find them to be completely impractical and I don't understand why everyone thinks that an SUV is the best vehicle ever. The only thing I can see in SUV is if you need to haul seven people and a big horse trailer and you need high clearance 4x4, well then in that case, you need a Suburban.

But just about every other solution I can come up with, some other design is superior. If you're looking at the small SUVs, a station wagon is in many cases a superior solution to a small SUV or a minivan is a more superior solution to a small SUV. The larger SUVs, a minivan is usually a better solution or a full-size van is a better solution.

So I don't hate SUVs. They just don't make a lot of practical sense. So why do people run to them? Well, it's about image. Let's talk about image because image does matter. This is obviously the fundamental problem that many people have with minivans. I don't see how you could have a problem with all the practical things that I talked about.

My wife, she always hated my expedition because she had to step up on the running board. She loves the minivan. She can just sit down. It's a lot easier to get into. So when we talk about objections and things like that, I don't see how they can be practical objections.

They're related to image. So here are some thoughts that you should consider. How important is image really? And what is the image that you're portraying going to do to you? I'll concede that image will make a difference in many things. The way that people perceive you is going to make a difference in how they treat you.

For example, I give my example where I probably lost 80% of the audience because I just think I'm crazy. I mentioned that young men and women of marriageable age should consider the image that they're trying to convey. But I mean it. I don't consider driving a vehicle with a lot of sex appeal to be the primary basis of vehicle selection.

I view it as a liability. And in most areas of image, if you think about it, you might agree with me. It's a liability because it's something – you're portraying something that you might want to change in the future. And it sets you up over a lifetime of trying to maintain this idea of I'm going to project sex appeal.

Interestingly, I mean in that situation, the body of your own physical human body is probably going to make a bigger difference than the physical body of the car that you drive when you're trying to convey an image. But image does make a difference. And so if you are incredibly insecure and you lack the security to drive a minivan, then perhaps you should consider driving something else.

But it would be a lot cheaper for you to fix the underlying fundamental problem, the problem with your self-image, than to go out and constantly buy a new car to try to feed your problems with self-worth. I'm not saying that everybody who doesn't drive a minivan doesn't have self-worth.

If you want to drive a different vehicle, go ahead. I'm just saying that for many people, this is their problem. I always found – I always like driving a van or a big vehicle because I always found I could have more fun, have more friends. In college, there wasn't a time that either me or my best friend didn't have a full-size SUV or a full-size van.

When you talk about the ability to have adventures, I always preferred to be the kind of person who would load up five or six people in their vehicle and be able to go and have some fun than to be able to fit one other person in the seat of my sports car.

By the way, I also faced this other problem that I can't actually fit in many of the smaller cars. So a larger vehicle is kind of important for me. What about things like sales, etc.? I think many people – meaning what about occupations where you need to project a certain image?

I think a minivan is something you should consider because it's one of those just in-between vehicles. Most people just don't think much about them. You can avoid the problems of perception in a couple of ways. You can avoid it by meeting the problem head-on and displaying something directly or you can just avoid it by getting into something where people aren't going to notice.

So I think a minivan can work great. The same way that a full-size SUV or a vehicle like a Prius or some of these in-between vehicles can avoid any negative perception, a minivan can work great. Now is it perceiving you as the salesman of the year? No. If you're running an MLM company and you've got to convince everybody that you're making so much money, well, you better go out and lease a fancy new sports car so that you can put your company's logo on the back and that way you can bamboozle everybody into thinking that you're making lots of money when you're actually not.

But if you don't have a need to do that and to scam people by displaying your flashiness, consider a minivan. Image and worrying about image can put you right into the poorhouse. I think it's a major character weakness. Now I'm not accusing those of you who say, "I'm a motorhead.

I want to drive a car that I like or have an enthusiast." Fine. If that's your thing, cool. But many people just have this weakness, this character weakness of considering what other people think and allowing what other people think to be the primary driver of their decisions. I think it's good to tackle this head-on as a character weakness.

Now when dealing with a character weakness, there might be a point in time that you need to indulge it. Great. But that shouldn't be a lifestyle because you will never, ever be able to meet up to other people's expectations of you. If you are worried about how other people perceive you based upon what you drive, it's possible that you're also going to be worried how other people perceive you based upon where you live and based upon what you wear and based upon what you do.

It's a recipe for failure, for misery. It's a recipe for misery because you will always fail. Think a little bit more. Think a little bit more deeply and consider if there's a way to tackle it in a different way. I think weaknesses and self-worth things, self-worth problems and the way that you perceive you is – those things can be changed.

I see driving a minivan as an expression of intelligence for all of those practical reasons that I just mentioned. Hope it doesn't sound like I think I'm better than you. I just think like when you actually look at the usefulness of a vehicle and you say – and you weigh all of those factors that I mentioned and you compare them based upon, "Well, I don't want to look like I'm driving a mom mobile." Seems a little silly to me to worry too much about driving a mom mobile.

Your mileage may vary. Hopefully, at least this sparked a little bit of conversation for you, a little bit of thoughtfulness for you. I love to see people be happy with their decisions. If any of you have ever bought a minivan and hated it and gone back to an SUV – because I guess that's really the focus of this show.

I would love to know about that. I've never met anybody who was in that situation. But feel free. Come by the show page at RadicalPersonalFinance.com. Comment and let me know why. I would love to know why. But there's my little diatribe against minivans. Hopefully, that was a fun show for you in coming back here after a few weeks of being away.

Thank you all for being patient with me. I needed a break. It's always hard when you're running a business to schedule the break. I felt guilty much of the time that I was away. But I did need the break. So back at it now. That's it for today's show.

Tomorrow's show is – I was going to tease it but I can't remember what show I scheduled it for. I think I scheduled it on lowering the cost of college. So that should be tomorrow's show, an interview on lowering the cost of college. I hope you'll be back with me to do that.

If I can serve any of you in any way, I'd be happy to serve you with a consulting call. Go to RadicalPersonalFinance.com/phonecall to book a phone call with me. Also, I'd be happy to – if you would like to support the show directly, please consider becoming a patron of the show, RadicalPersonalFinance.com/patron.

Also today was the first time that I went ahead and live streamed the show online on YouTube. One of the things that I worked on was to improve that. So thank you to those of you who are watching on YouTube. I haven't perfected the technology. Today was the first test.

But feel free to come by and check out the YouTube channel. It's like YouTube.com/c/RadicalPersonalFinance, something like that. Primarily, there's just been audio of past shows up there, but I intend to be live streaming the show more and more, at least when I'm doing it from my home office. Thank you all for listening.

Be back with you soon. (upbeat music)