The LA Kings holiday pack is back. The perfect gift for the hockey fan in your life. A three game pack starts at just $159 and includes a holiday blanket. Buy today and you'll receive an additional game for free. Don't miss out. Visit lakings.com/holiday today. Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show 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.

Today, we're going to focus a little bit on that word insight. Specifically as it relates to the purchase of a recreational vehicle, an RV. We're in the middle of an asset protection series here on Radical Personal Finance. Just finished up homestead exemptions. We're next going to talk about retirement account exemptions, but in the middle of this asset protection series, I have a problem.

The problem is half of my audience loves technical financial planning and half of my audience hates it. So I'm going to mix up that series with just a short discussion on RVs and today's show, the only three legitimate reasons to buy an RV, obviously that's a quite cocky statement, which I will expand on in a moment, but it's official.

My wife and I have officially ended our own RV trip. We've been on the road for five months, traveled about 13,000 miles around the United States, essentially from one coast to the other, and in so doing, I have learned and analyzed quite a bit of the United States and quite a bit of this RV lifestyle.

I will share more on some of the personal lessons learned on that trip in a separate episode at some point, probably here in the month of December. But today I want to talk about a show idea that has been on my head as I drive many thousands of miles, just looking and thinking and analyzing, and it is this.

There are only three legitimate reasons that I can find to buy an RV. Now I will hasten to qualify that statement to say it's your money, your reasons, you do whatever you want. But these are just three reasons that make sense to me. And I think if you hear them and analyze your situation in light of them, you will probably make a better decision with regard to your potential purchase of an RV.

Some people buy RVs and they're deeply happy with them. Some people buy RVs and they find it's one of the more expensive wastes of money that they have ever, well, frankly engaged in. And so let me explain to you three good reasons to have an RV. In a separate show, and I'll briefly mention at the end of the show, I'll give you an out, I'll give you a great compromise situation that I think will work ideally for many people who are looking for a solution to an RV, but are concerned about buying a big fancy one.

So stay tuned for that towards the end. Number one, the number one legitimate reason for you to buy an RV is if you want to comfortably sleep and live in a place where there are few or no hotels, the number one reason for you to buy an RV is if you want to comfortably sleep, stay, and live where there are no hotels.

I have become fully persuaded that hotel living is a tremendous bargain. The ability to just to rent a hotel room for one night or 20 nights, whatever you like is a tremendous bargain. And it is a much better bargain than buying an RV. Even if you are a cheap person like me, even if you are obsessive about trying to get the best deal and save money, hotels are a bargain.

They are cheap. But there are a lot of places that you might like to be where there simply are no hotels. Perhaps the best example would be if you travel around the United States, especially in the Western United States, you will find many millions of acres of wild land where you are legally free to stay and hunt, take pictures, hike, climb, engage in whatever your version of outdoor recreation is.

You're legally entitled to stay there, but there are no hotels there. Now, don't miss the fact that you don't need an RV to stay in those places. You can bring along a tent, you can roll out your bed, roll under the stars, you can sleep in your car. There are all kinds of things you can do that don't involve an RV, which is why I use the word comfortably.

If you want to comfortably stay where there are no hotels, then an RV is a ticket that you will appreciate. You see this especially out in the Western United States. There is a big difference between the Eastern United States, the built up populous areas near the coast, and the Western United States, especially in terms of RV ownership.

You can just see it as you drive down the road. If you go out into the country, especially in the country in the Western United States, it seems as though virtually everybody has an RV in their driveway. And that makes sense to me because there's so much land available where you can park, where you can recreate to your heart's content.

And the RV brings a huge measure of comfort to that experience. The RV brings the ability to run a heater when it's cold, a nice propane heater, and keep yourself warm. It brings the ability to run an air conditioner when it's hot, a nice air conditioner, keep yourself cool.

It runs the ability to have a nice comfortable bed with a comfortable mattress where you're not lying on the floor on some thermo rest thing with a rock poking through. It gives you the ability to have a shower, to have a bathroom, to have facilities where you can cook food and eat dinner together.

And an RV solves those things beautifully. It brings comfort in a place where there are no hotels. Many people do like going out with a tent. Many people do like going out and cooking their food. But with the, you know, on the ground and the fire, but when you have an RV, you can live in those places, you can be comfortable in those places and since there are no hotels in those places, really, if you want that high level of comfort, an RV is your only solution.

Now, remember that there are many types of RVs and the bigger your RV, the less off the beaten path you'll be able to go. But an RV works beautifully in that situation. There are other contexts as well. Perhaps you enjoy going to the races or you enjoy going to the football games and tailgating.

RVs work wonderfully in those circumstances. You can show up the night before, get a good night's sleep, be parked on the inside track, be able to hang out all day with your buddies. When everyone else is fighting traffic, trying to leave, you're hanging out, cracking the top on another beer while you sit there and enjoy the rest of the day, and then you leave the next morning.

Perhaps you like to go and race cars. Well, you can be comfortable in your RV while you are at the track. Perhaps you ride in the rodeo. Well, you can stay comfortably in your RV, care for your horses while you're there at the event. And so these are places where there are no hotels on the racetrack.

There are no hotels in the rodeo grounds, but your RV can be there and you can be quite comfortable there. So if your travel goals or your lifestyle goals involve your traveling in places where there are no hotels, and if you want to comfortably stay in those places, an RV is a wonderful way for you to do that.

Legitimate reason number two for you to consider buying an RV is if you want to travel for a significantly extended period and you want to have your stuff settled around you so that you're not moving here and moving there. Now, I believe that travel period needs to be significant, needs to be quite extended.

If you want to go on a two week family vacation to the national parks, I recommend, if you want to stay at an RV, rent an RV. It will be a better move for you to rent your RV than it will be for you to buy that. And my observation is that people get it.

All every place I've been, you will see tons and tons of rental RVs. I went to Grand Canyon National Park and there are dozens. And the campground that's there for RVs, the big campground, there are dozens and dozens of rental RVs out there. So people get this. But you can rent a great RV and have a great trip if you want to do that for a short period of time.

And that is definitely financially the best move. But if you want to travel for an extended period of time, I'm thinking months if not years, months if not years, then buying an RV is going to be a good solution for you. I would caution you, however, don't first jump to the idea of RVing thinking that that's the only way for you to travel for an extended period of time.

RVing is not the only way for you to travel for an extended period of time. I go back to hotels and lodges and short term house rentals. There are so many places available that you can stay, that you can travel for a very long time, years, without ever buying an RV.

And it might be the case that in your family situation, that's your best move. I went through this conversation with a friend of mine who, he and his wife are snowbirds. They don't enjoy being in the snow in the winter, so they like to fly south. And they thought about buying an RV and traveling in an RV.

But ultimately, their decision was simply to travel in their car and to stay in hotels along the way. Now, if you have a spry and active middle-aged couple who is able to drive a small SUV around, they can fit all their things in an SUV without any problem. They can drive an SUV, they can stay in hotels, and by not traveling frenetically, by staying in a hotel at least for a few days at a time, if not weeks, if they're in a nice location, they can enjoy enough slowness of travel to really get a lot out of their trip.

And by not having a big rig that you have to drive around, you can get a high gas mileage. I mean, just simply do the math on this. Consider the simple fuel cost of dragging around an RV with you. So pretend for a moment that you didn't have to buy an RV.

Pretend for a moment that most of the ones that most people buy cost at minimum $30,000 for a travel trailer, up to many hundreds of thousands of dollars for a nice, enjoyable RV. So when I was traveling with a diesel pickup truck and a travel trailer, I can get about 10, basically I always get 10 miles per gallon.

Whenever I'm towing, I get 10 miles per gallon. Now, we traveled a lot and you do not have to travel as much. You don't have to drive as much. Gas, the amount of diesel fuel you put in your truck is directly correlated to how much you travel. But for our purposes, we traveled a lot.

And so let's, let me show you how the math works out. We traveled about 13,000 miles on our recent five month trip. And I want to, at the risk of wearing you out, repeat for the fourth time, we traveled a lot. This is generally by every experienced traveler. The normal course of action is when you start traveling, you move a lot.

And then over time, people start to slow down. We didn't want to travel as much as we did, but in order for us to get what we wanted out of our trip, we did travel a lot. You don't have to move as much. You could spend five months and drive a thousand miles.

We moved a lot. So 13,000 miles at 10 miles per gallon, that comes out to 1,300 gallons of diesel fuel. So if you assume we spent that we did, we use 1,300 gallons of diesel fuel. And if we assume an average right now of about $3 and 20 cents a gallon for diesel, I'll have to go in.

I need to go and compute my own average since then, but I would say it's probably somewhere just north of $3. So $3 and 20 cents per gallon of diesel, which if you're traveling in another place, it's a lot more expensive. Thankfully in the United States, it's cheaper than Canada or Europe.

So 1,300 times $3 and 20 cents comes out to be $4,160 in fuel costs. Obviously we're ignoring motor oil. We're ignoring tire wear and tear. This is just simply fuel. $4,160 of fuel. Now, if my wife and I were traveling or perhaps even with our children, and if we could travel in a fuel efficient car, let's go to the best example.

We drive a Prius. I could comfortably travel the United States and I have in a Prius. And the wonderful thing about that is you, if you're slowed down and you're not knowing 75, you could do 65 or seven, you can get 50 miles a gallon on the highway in a modern Prius.

Let's just use that. 13,000 miles divided by 50 miles per gallon comes out to a total fuel of only fuel cost of only 260 gallons instead of 1,300 gallons for the diesel pickup truck. 260 gallons of regular unleaded, which would be, let's just say $2 and 35 cents on a national average right now, instead of $3 and 20 cents for diesel fuel comes out to $611 of fuel for the same 13,000 miles of driving.

Remember driving the diesel pickup truck, dragging a trailer, getting 10 miles per gallon because you're dragging a big trailer is $4,160 of diesel fuel. Whereas the Prius is $611 of gasoline. Well, run the difference between 4,160 and 611 and you wind up with $3,549 of savings that's available to you.

$3,549 of fuel savings by you're not driving a big truck with a big trailer. If we divide that into the same five month time period that we were traveling, divide that into 150 nights, 30 days per month times five months, just assume you're 150 night trip. Then even in that situation, you have an extra $23 and a half per day.

Let's call it $24 per day. That's available to you. If you're not driving a big RV. 10 miles per gallon in RV is a good planning perspective to use. If you're buying a larger class A or large car class C, you're going to get closer to eight. Some of the big, big ones, you're going to get six or seven.

If you're depending on how fast you're going. So somewhere between six and 10 is a good thing to choose. There are nice RVs, generally smaller, a class B, a van camper, especially one with a modern diesel engine that you can get closer to 15 or 16 or sometimes 18, but in that general, you're going to be spending in excess of a hundred thousand dollars for those rigs.

And so now you're going to be dealing with a much different price perspective. So the point is you could add $25 a day to your daily budget by not dragging around a giant camper. So if you added $25 per day, and you just said, instead of spending this $25 per day on simply fuel, I'm going to spend it on hotel stays.

You change the makeup of your budget. Now I'm understating the expenses of traveling around with an RV and I'm, I'm specifically ignoring so far RV systems maintenance, all I'm saying is fuel. That ignores the fact that a diesel pickup truck will usually use somewhere between 12 and 15 quarts of oil.

If you have a more modern one, you can make it five or 6,000 miles before an oil change. Um, for my truck, it's 3000 miles. I'm ignoring the cost of tires. I'm ignoring other repairs. When you're pulling heavy stuff, you're making your vehicle work. You're going to have more repairs on, on the systems of your vehicle than driving around in a Toyota Prius or an SUV or whatever it is that you choose to drive.

So with my friend who travels as a snowbird, what they've done, they travel all across the country. They just simply travel in an SUV and they bring along their bicycles. They've got their stuff with them. They got plenty of stuff and they stay in hotels and you can do that very comfortably.

And you should seriously consider doing that. Now, if you want to travel for an extended period of time, months, and if you want to have your things settled with you, especially things like having children, my wife and I have young children. Hotels work fine. They can work fine to sleep in with young children.

But if you're traveling a lot of miles, it is very nice to be able to pull into a rest area and put them in their beds. It is very freeing to have those facilities with you. So consider, will you actually be traveling for an extended period of time? And do your personal circumstances make it such that you'd like to have your things packed up, put away?

You don't want to be taking a suitcase in and out of a hotel, et cetera. Don't jump too fast at saying, "Oh, I just don't want to stay in hotels." If you are willing to stay in hotels, there are a lot of places that you can go that you will not be able to get your RV.

Taking your RV into downtown New York City is incredibly stressful. Much easier for you to simply get a hotel and enjoy the city experience. Now you can do both. You can leave your RV outside of the city and you can go into the city and get a place to stay.

The point is just consider it. Between number one and number two, I think you'll probably have enough to be able to make a decision about whether an RV is right for you. If there are hotels available in most of the places where you wish to be, and if you don't mind not having all your stuff set up in your living room all the time, give serious thought to not choosing an RV.

Give serious thought to doing vacation rentals. Give serious thought to traveling in a car. Give serious thought to not having an RV because you can do away with a whole lot of expense, a whole lot of stress, a whole lot of hassle by not having an RV. But on the other hand, if you want to stay in places where there aren't hotels and you'd like to have your things around you because you're working full time on the road, you're traveling for six months or a year and you've got small children and you're working, you want to be in places where there just simply aren't hotel facilities and you can't imagine sleeping on the ground, an RV is a perfect tool for you to have.

Which brings me to number three. Number three. My number three legitimate reason to have an RV is if you'd like to have a backup plan, a bug out plan in case you need to move your family and maintain the integrity of your family unit and your life circumstances, an RV works wonderfully for that.

The past weeks we've seen, of course, the horror of the California wildfires, seen many thousands of families have their homes destroyed, had their lives disrupted. Many people die. When you're in a situation like that, you need a bug out plan. You got to plan to get out. Now, the circumstances of that fire is that the fire arose so fast, especially the campfire, which is one of the worst.

The fire arose so fast, there wasn't a lot of time for pre-planning. If there's a fire coming over the hill, hopefully you've got your fire plan in place and you know it's a couple of days away. Hopefully you've got everything packed up and you're ready to leave. Well, my understanding of the campfire is that it was birthed or lit basically in the morning and then it spread immediately.

So there was very little time of preparation, but an RV can work well, as long as you're not stuck in traffic and on little roads, an RV can work well as a good way for you to get your family out of an area, but I don't think it's the best for that.

Usually you'd want to be more nimble. Where an RV works well is if you need a backup plan for your family to live in. I consider the most likely threat that most people will face in their life is economic disruption in their personal life. That economic disruption can come in the form of a simple job loss for an individual person.

That economic disruption can come in the form of a collapsing local economy. Think Detroit, Michigan. That economic disruption can come in the form of a regional calamity. Think Hurricane Katrina devastating the Gulf Coast. That economic disruption could come in terms of a regional or national economic crisis of some kind.

Think Argentina. Think Venezuela. Think Egypt after the Arab Spring. These types of regional crises that a family can face. So whether it's on a small scale or a larger scale, the most important thing to have in that circumstance is the ability to leave the place where things are bad and go to a place where things are better.

Again, the best solution for you to keep your family unit intact in those circumstances is to leave the place where things are bad and go to a place where things are better. Now, most short-term disasters, wildfire, hurricane, et cetera, most short-term things don't necessarily destroy a local economy. And so most people can just simply load up their car, go a few hundred miles away, stay in a hotel for a few days.

Once the floodwaters of Houston recede, you can go back to Houston to shovel out your house and rebuild your life. But there are problems that are so widespread and that attack a region where coming back, at least in the short term, is just not, doesn't work. That can happen because your profession is no longer needed.

You're a coal miner in West Virginia. Well, you should leave. Or you build cars in Detroit, you should leave. Or you live in Flint, Michigan and the waters, leave. So whether that's a regional thing or whether it's a regional thing that just simply just so devastates the infrastructure, again, New Orleans, where thousands of people leave and are never coming back.

So in those circumstances, you want the ability to pack up your family and go from where things are bad to where things are better. In a country like the United States, where you have such massive borders and you have such economic diversity across the country, one of your best ways to do that is just simply go to a different state.

An RV works very well as a backup plan in that kind of scenario. This is one of the concepts that I was curious about prior to going on the road that I wanted to prove and see what's it actually like. But if you buy the right kind of RV, ours is a bunkhouse model.

We have bunks for all of our children to close the door. Even though it's small, you can have all your things. You can have self-contained systems and you can move in comfort from one place to another place. And by having your own roof over your head, you can often go to a place where the jobs are good, but the housing market is tight.

Think North Dakota and the oil boom. There was no housing anywhere. So if you could provide your own housing, though, you could get a great job. And if you have the ability to put your own roof over your head, you can slide in. If you're in an economic disaster, you've run out of money, you've been foreclosed out of your house, you've had to leave, you dropped the keys on the front door and you've just said, we're going to pack it.

We have a garage sale for all of our furniture. We load up the RV. We're going to move from Georgia to Kansas and we're going to start fresh. But we're going to go where the jobs are good. We're going to go where the economy is good. Well, in an RV, you can relatively easily find a place to park it.

You can rent somebody's driveway from them for a few hundred dollars a month. You can stay in a campground. You can stay in an RV park and you can reset your life. You can have low expenses to keep a roof over your family's head and reasonable comfort while you then save up the money that you need for a first, first month, last month in security deposit on a rental house, or you can save up money to buy a place, et cetera.

So it can be a good economic transition plan. I know most people don't probably don't think about that, but fatherhood has changed me in that regard. When I was single, I was incredibly flexible. And if you're a single person, you don't need a big RV as a backup plan.

You can go live in one if you want to, but you can sleep in your car. You can crash on a friend's couch, et cetera. Uh, but being the father of many young children and having all of the associated responsibilities, it would be a little bit hard for me and my family to say to people, even well-meaning, nice people, Hey, listen, can we come and stay on your couch?

We would basically take over and completely disrupt their household. But it's a lot easier for me to say to somebody, Hey, listen, can we park in your backyard or can we park in your back acreage for a couple of months while we transition, we're having some troubles and we're trying to get started.

And so being a father who, who has the responsibility to provide for many helpless people, it's changed the appreciation that I have for being able to do that. And when you look at economic disruption that people face, when they lose their job, lose their house, have a medical emergency, et cetera, if you can keep your family together and you're not dispersed, you're not, you know, if I had to send my wife to her parents and so-and-so is taking care of the kids and I'm off working in another country, this does not do well for family life.

I've worked with so many people who've been in that situation. You know, they go to another country to work. It doesn't do well. I'm not doing it. I'm taking my family with me. And an RV is a great way to do that. Especially if you live in a large country like the United States or, or, or many places, if you live in the European union, where you can travel among many different countries, if you live in a place where you can move substantially change your geography, the RV is a good backup plan.

Now, the cool thing about it, if you put those three things together, if you, all three of them apply to you, I think you can be totally happy and satisfied with the purchase of an RV. If you enjoy staying in the places where there are no hotels, you love to go out and, and, and travel up a forest service road and stay at a little forest service campground for free at the top of a mountain.

There's no hotels out there. If you enjoy being out there for a week and you like to be able to stay out there and sleep well and have your family together and watch your kids play in the woods and, and, and ride your four wheelers and do all that kind of thing.

And if you like the idea of having a backup plan, in case your house gets burned down or blown down, well, in that situation, then the RV is a wonderful thing to have. And you can buy one relatively inexpensively. You can keep one with relatively little hassle, and it'd be a tremendous benefit for you.

You'll be happy because when all three of those things are together, you'll be so satisfied with the RV purchase. I love the RV purchase that we made because it has allowed us to comfortably stay where there are no hotels, to enjoy some really peak experiences that I never could have enjoyed if we were stuck to staying where we could purchase accommodation, it's allowed us to travel for a very extended period of time.

And to have all of our things settled. And I love having that backup plan as a way for my place for my family to live that's mobile, that we could move our entire household from one region of the country to another region of the country. If we needed to.

If those three things are together, you can make a very, very satisfying RV purchase. But on the other hand, I think that if those three things are questionable, you're probably not going to be happy buying an RV. First, if you're just going to travel places where there are hotels, don't get an RV.

If you're going to travel places where there's lots of lodging options available, don't get an RV. If you're going to travel for short periods of time, two week family vacation, you're thinking that an RV is going to be a great solution for you. I don't think it is because what happens, you spend just as much time in that circumstance, you spend just as much time loading up your pack, more time loading up and preparing your RV for a two week trip, getting all the stuff out of your house, putting it in the RV.

And then when you get home two weeks later, you got to get all the stuff out, put it away. It's very stressful because you don't know what you need. You're not leaving the RV packed all the time. It's just a lot of hassle. Better off for you just to say, we're going to just throw some clothes in the bag.

And go, we're going to eat out. We're going to stay at a hotel. It's going to be great. You'll have less stress than you will dealing with an RV. If you're only going for a short period of time, my wife and I found this when we had wonderful invitations from people to stay in places, but just even though we could take the RV to a, um, somebody's house and they said here, stay in the house and we enjoyed staying in the house.

It was so much work for us to unload the RV, figure out what we needed in the house, the clothes, the toys, the food, you know, the, the, the equipment to take it all in the house, set up in the house for however long we're going to be there.

A few days, few weeks. And then at the end of it, to clean up the house and put all the stuff back in every RV, we came to the point where we just rather just stay in the RV and the same thing applies in that vacation standpoint, you spend days preparing and then a few days on the trip and then days cleaning up.

And then finally, if you don't care about having a backup plan or a bug out plan, or if your bug out plan involves you traveling to a different country on an airplane or jumping on your boat or something like that, many situations in RV wouldn't actually work. Again, if I were fleeing from a fire, if it's coming in, you want to be in a nimble car, you don't want to be dragging around a giant trailer.

So those are the kinds of things that, that if those don't apply to you, I recommend you stay away from an RV. Now, can you live cheaply in an RV? Yes, you can. Can you do it cheap? Yes. There are people who use RVs to massive economic benefit. I always enjoy seeing the people who, they love to go and snow ski country.

And they just take their RV and every weekend they go and stay in the parking lot of the ski lodge and then hit the fresh powder on Saturday morning. The reason you can do that most of the time is because many ski resorts are leased or placed on national forest land.

And so the technically the parking lot is national forest land. So you can take your RV and you can stay in a, uh, in the, in the parking lot and stay there and then go and ski and you can save yourself a few hundred dollars a night on that hotel lodging.

And you can avoid a lot of the traffic getting out there to the slopes. So there are many ways to do it. And you don't have to spend a lot of money in an RV. I met many just broke people living in an RV full time. But if you are going to maintain a certain standard of comfort, especially if you're providing for others, if you're going to maintain a middle-class lifestyle, RVs are not cheap.

When the equipment breaks, it's expensive. If you're a single, you can do it cheap. You don't care. You can, you can put stuff together, but if you're just going to maintain kind of middle-class standards, it's hard to do it cheap. Now there is, I believe an ideal solution for you.

If you are trying to put these three things together, but it's not a slam dunk for you, for example, you like to stay where there are no hotels, but you're not going to do it for a long period of time, or you don't want to do it all the time.

And the solution is the pop-up camper, which I will create an entirely separate show to try to sell you on the idea of a pop-up camper. But here's what you should know in preparation for that show. I grew up camping in a pop-up camper and I hated it. And I promised myself that I would never have a pop-up camper.

I told my wife for years, how much I disliked pop-up tent campers, and I never wanted to have a pop-up tent camper. Today, I would be thoroughly happy to have a pop-up tent camper. And I'm going to recommend to you in a separate episode that your next RV or your only RV should be a pop-up tent camper.

And I'll explain how the pop-up tent camper satisfies all of these things in a really ideal way. It gives a good balance here that I think for most people is far more compelling than they think. Now it won't work for long-term travel where you're living in it. But for most of the ways that most US Americans own and use RVs, a pop-up tent camper really will be an ideal solution.

I'll save that one for a separate show. Now as I close today's show and wrap it up, I want to take just a moment and talk to you about one of the biggest questions that people ask about while traveling is health care. How do you obtain for yourself appropriate health care on the road?

And I'm doing this as an ad for Samaritan Ministries, and I'll explain how and why it works in a moment. I've done many series of shows on health care sharing ministries. If you're unfamiliar with them, a health care sharing ministry is a religious organization and/or an ideological organization, which specifically involves the ability of members of that organization to share their expenses with one another.

These organizations are not health insurance. There is no legal contract between you and a health insurance company, but they do function in some way similar to health insurance, whereas you incur medical expenses, those medical expenses can, may, probably will be, legally or not guaranteed to be, but probably will be paid for and shared among your fellow members.

There are a variety of these out there. I've done shows on a number of them, and they range from, and the reason I point out religious ideology and ideology being important is there has to be an ideological component to them. Most of these are Christian organizations, although the brand of Christianity will vary depending on the company.

So you'll have a very kind of loose, general things like liberty, what they call liberty health sharing, where we affirm that God is about liberty kind of thing, just this very vague theological convictions to the one that my family and I use, which is called Samaritan Ministries, which is extremely conservative, Trinitarian, Protestant doctrine, et cetera.

Though I think you can join if you're not Protestant as well, if you're Orthodox or Catholic. So the point is that these organizations really work wonderfully. And when traveling, one of the things that I have most enjoyed about a healthcare sharing ministry is it works the way that health things should work.

In this way, when my wife and I, if we need to consult a doctor or a care provider or something like that, we just simply go and choose one. And as we've traveled across the country, it's been easy for us to choose one anywhere of any brand or any variety that's worked for us.

And then when we're done with that medical service, we just simply pay the medical provider. Just take $20 bills or a hundred dollar bills, the case may be out of my wallet, and I pay them for their service. And in that payment, I'm able to get a very reasonable price.

I understand that healthcare generally costs a lot, but when you start pulling physical paper money out of your pocket, you can get a lot of health providers to do a lot of things for a lot cheaper price. And then when we're done with it, whenever we're done with that event, I just take those bills, I submit them to Samaritan Ministries for reimbursement.

They share it and I get checks in the mail. And it is wonderful. I don't have to worry about networks. I don't have to worry about preferred providers. I don't have to worry about any of those things. I just simply go, get service, pay for it, and then later am reimbursed.

Healthcare sharing is a wonderful solution. It's not perfect. Go back and listen to the long series of shows that I have done on it. It has disadvantages. It's not for everyone. It's certainly not for everyone. If you can't find a company that will be, that you can affirm their ideological statements or statement of faith.

If you can't find a company that, that has the coverage that you need or your concerned about extreme scenarios, then it's not for everyone. You need to be very, very careful. But if you're looking for a healthcare solution, health, something that works similar to health insurance, if you're looking for a solution, at least check out the Healthcare Sharing Ministries.

Cause I'll tell you, as we have traveled, we have loved our experience with Samaritan Ministries. Go and check it out on Samaritan Ministries website. Go and check it out the past episodes of the show. If you find that Samaritan Ministries specifically or Healthcare Sharing Ministry in general is helpful for you, if you wind up signing up, just let them know that Joshua Sheets sent you.

Now specifically, let me explain. Samaritan Ministries doesn't pay me money to advertise for them, but they do have a referral program where if you refer clients to them, they discount your next bill, and so from time to time I have listeners of the show who will sign up for Samaritan Ministries, and every time that a listener of the show signs up, then my next month's bill is discounted.

Usually my bill is about $500 a month based upon the plan that we're on for my family and our needs. But then sometimes it comes in and it's 300, sometimes it comes in and it's $100 a month because listeners sign up, and when you're signing up for Samaritan Ministries, you mention to them, "Hey, Joshua Sheets sent me." They say, "Look me up," and then they discount my bill.

Here's the cool thing. That's also available to you. So I'm not using any super special podcast advertising program. They're not paying me money for this ad I'm doing for them right now. I'm just doing it to lower my monthly expense because if you sign up, then I get a discount.

I think it's $100 or $150 that discounts my bill when any one of you sign up. But then you can do the same thing. So after you sign up, if one of your friends signs up, they mention your name and you can have access to the same program. That's of course very helpful to you and to me, which is why I do these ads from time to time.

Go and check out Healthcare Sharing Ministries. Do your research. They might be right for you. At some point, I intend to create an entire course on Healthcare Sharing Ministries that'll answer your questions. I'll sell it to you just so that you can understand the pros and cons, how they work, et cetera.

They're not for everyone, but go and check out the different options. Did a series of shows and check out Samaritan Ministries. If you can affirm their statements of faith and et cetera, their very kind of strict rules, if you can affirm the things that are excluded from care, very important that you understand what those things are.

The things that Samaritan Ministries excludes from care are very offensive to some people. They're very welcome to other people. So you read those things carefully, but if you find that they're right, that it's a good solution for your family, just let them know Joshua Sheets sent you and my future lower to non-existent bill will thank you.

Or at least I'll thank you when I receive that bill. Be back with you very soon. Thank you for listening. With Kroger brand products from Ralph's, you can make all your favorite things this holiday season because Kroger brands proven quality products come at exceptionally low prices and with a money back quality guarantee.

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