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Exclusions apply. See website for details. 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. My guest on today's show is Miles.

Miles Wakem, welcome to the show. Thank you. Great to be here. So I've had you on. We're going to have a chat about finances. You blog over at beunconstrained.com, talking about your journey to financial independence. And specifically, I've had you on because you have been doing a recent series, but also having some recent experiences specifically on the topic of medical tourism.

You've been doing some work in Mexico, and I want to hear all about that and talk about it, because I think it's a very key financial strategy that more and more of us can and should implement. But begin with just a little bit of your background. How did you wind up in the United States doing the kind of work you're doing, and how did you wind up interested in finance?

It's a very interesting question. I've always been a-- when I was a kid, I was always into business. I always liked businesses. When I was eight years old, I ran paper rounds, and then I decided to get two of them and three of them and scaled it up and became like the king of paper rounds in my suburb in Australia.

And that led into all different various businesses and part-time jobs when I was a teenager all the way through to getting out of school probably way earlier than I should have and going into business on my own. And I got lucky and got into the computer world in 1978, right when the personal computers first started coming out.

Built one of the first software companies in my hometown, employed a dozen people and sold it when I was 24, 23, 24. Got out, came to the United States because I was working-- one of my clients was a defense contractor building submarines in Australia, and I met a lot of guys from the States when I was working there.

And one of them said, you sound like a smart guy. Why don't you come over and work for me? And I ended up in Los Angeles. I ended up doing a little bit of work there and then stumbled into a company that got into this thing called Biotechnology, which I had no idea what that was.

And that company became Amgen. So I was one of the first, I don't know, hundred and something people to stay there. And I ended up staying there for about five years and left with a ton of stock options, which I didn't even know what they were, and retired. And I was about 32, I think.

I went back to Australia and that didn't end well. I kind of followed in your-- I'm kind of like the poster child of what happens when you retire too early. And I know you've spoken about that before. I can attest to the fact it's 100% correct. Don't retire too early.

Don't retire. Actually, I hate that word. It's something that doesn't resonate well with me. But I did find myself going from zero to hero to zero in that world. And then I ended up with the dot-com boom sort of happened. I found myself sort of, I don't know, not getting anything really substantial done in life back in my hometown.

So I decided to get back on a plane and came back to California and then eventually moved to Arizona. And I've been here for-- ever since, what's that, 20 years now. How much money did you have when you retired at 32? Geez, I don't remember now. It was in the hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars.

I bought a house freehold, so I never had any costs. I had a lot of money. We ended up buying some rental properties as well. And what did you do with yourself? I got really bored. I built a recording studio. I've always been a musical kind of guy. I always liked recording engineering.

I learned a lot about that when I was living in California. And I built a studio and I was recording bands, albums, because I had nothing better to do. The funny thing is I got divorced, probably because I found myself in this what do I do now point of life.

And my wife at the time was looking at me going, well, where does life go from here? And I didn't have an answer because I was-- the journey had come to an end at that point for me and I didn't know what my next chapter was going to be.

And she didn't want to wait around, try and wait for me to find that out. So I ended up losing pretty much most of what I had gained. So you go from financially independent to financially divorced very quickly. And for anybody out there who's had to go through that, I don't wish it upon anyone.

But that kind of also led to my-- I don't know, it's kind of a weird thing and it's the segue that goes into the whole medical thing. I found myself alone and in pretty dark time at that point. And I might not have needed money, but that was the least of my concerns back then.

And some friends of mine said to me one day, do you want to-- it was about just after Christmas time. It was like the day after Christmas. They had planned this epic road trip to go up into the Queensland, which is like the tropical area of Australia, to have New Year's Eve up there.

And they said, look, you don't want to be sitting around here sort of wallowing in your misery. You want to come with us. So I said, yeah, all right, sounds like a plan. Jumped in the car and we drove two days to our destination, had a week there and we're driving back, got one day through it, got in the second day and then really bad things started to happen, which is kind of where the whole medical journey begins.

What happened? Well, we were driving back across the outback of Australia, pretty sort of desolate area. And I had driven the first few hours of that day. It was our second day on our way back home. And we stopped for lunch. It was myself, a friend of mine who was in the car and his girlfriend.

And we were driving back. We got about halfway through it. We had lunch. We got back and it was like, okay, he says it's my turn to drive. So I said, sure, here you go. Here's the keys. I get in the back of the car. I'm in the rear seat.

And off he goes. We drove for about 20 minutes. I'm in there happily reading a book and just, you know, there's not much else you can do when you're in the middle of nowhere in the outback of Australia. You sit there reading a book, letting him do the driving.

We went over this crest. You know, the road just crested over the top of the hill. And I didn't think much of it. Next thing you know, I'm hearing -- I hear water, which is weird. I mean, I'm in the middle of the outback of Australia. It's a splash.

I look up and we're in a lake. I mean, all I could tell you was this vast water. He'd like driven us into a lake. And it wasn't his fault. There was a flash flood. It washed out the road and no one had put any signs up to tell anybody.

And, you know, I guess maybe it was because we just had lunch and he was traveling probably faster than he should have. But he didn't see it. We hit the water and like a stone skipping over, you know, if you throw a stone across the ocean, it bounces across the top.

We became that stone. We hydroplaned at rapid speed. And I just remember in the back of my mind -- because everything slows down, right? It goes down to everything seems like a slow motion experience, like a movie. And I remember saying to myself -- his name's Lindsay. And I said, "Lindsay, don't lose it, buddy.

Don't lose control of the car." And then black, nothing. And that's all I remember. The next thing you know, I wake up and there's this guy cutting the car apart with the jaws of life. And I'm in the back. And then on top of me is the car seat from the front passenger seat.

And on top of that was my buddy's girlfriend. And these guys are cutting me out of the car. And I'm literally going to say to them, "Hey, forget about me. Get her. She's sitting on top of me. You know, get her." But they wouldn't touch her. And I'm like, "What the heck?" Anyway, they pulled me out of the car.

It was kind of gruesome. They got me out, put me on a stretcher. And it was at that point I looked back and realized she was dead. And, you know, waking up with a dead body on top of you is kind of not something I'd suggest to anybody, but it happens.

And anyway, they put you on a stretcher and put you on a medical ambulance and drive you back to the closest country town with a hospital and put us in the emergency room. And then I remember at that point they must have injected something into me because I was out for I think about six days in a medically induced coma while they tried to put me back together again.

And, yeah, after that I woke up back in my hometown. They must have airlifted us to our local hospital. And I found myself in the bowels of the socialist world of medicine, of Australia, and I'm in a room with six other people and I'm getting some level of treatment and I'm on morphine and, you know, it was like that for a few days before they started treating me.

So, yeah, what ended up happening was I broke my right femur, snapped it in half. They pinned that back together before I woke up, which was good. And then my left shoulder and humerus had been broken in five places and the -- so without getting too medical, everyone in their, you know, their top arm has a humerus, a big bone with a bowl on the top that slots into your shoulder joint.

In my case the bowl had completely broken off from the bone, completely severed, and then the bone itself had broken in five places. So they pinned the bone back together as best they could, but they couldn't put the bowl on the top of the bone anymore because they had these pins sticking out of it.

Well, when they do that, the best they could do was to stick it on the side of the bone. So I ended up walking around with this deformed shoulder and that was kind of, you know, I remember the doctor coming into the hospital and saying, well, I'm sorry, buddy, but this is what you've got for the rest of your life.

This is what you're going to be dealing with. And I'm like, you're kidding, aren't you? Come on, you can do a better job than that. And he's like, no, that's it. That's the best we can do. You're going to have arthritis. You're going to have limited motion. You know, you'd be lucky if you can raise your arm above 90 degrees on a good day.

But, you know, hey, you didn't die. You know, we're all patting ourselves on the back here because you didn't die. And I'm like, well, thank you for that, but maybe you can fix this thing? And he's like, no. So, you know, no medicine for you. And that was what I've been living with for the last 22 years.

Wow. So what precipitated your deciding to have fresh surgery and then going through the process of trying to figure out where and how to get that surgery? Why now? Well, there was a sort of a period post-surgery in Australia when I had this before I decided to come back to the U.S.

I found myself battling against the insurance company, which connects the dots to tell the story. So in Australia, when you register a motor vehicle, at least in the state where we lived, it was mandatory as part of your registration that the state government provides a third-party liability policy, and it comes with the insurance.

So your insurance is much higher than it would be in the United States, but you've got this liability policy built into it. And that policy is supposed to cover anybody who has some sort of medical, you know, impact from an accident, of which clearly I was that guy. I was in the rear seat passenger here.

I had no control of the vehicle. I had no control of destiny here. I wore it. So the way the medical system works in Australia is you get put into the government medical system, whether you like it or not, with accident and emergencies. And in my case, they put me in, they patched me up, they shipped me out, and then all the post-surgery stuff was all supposed to be covered by the insurance that we were given by mandatory, you know, they push it on you, you don't get a choice.

It was supposed to pick up all the post-op, all of the physical therapy, everything. And after a few weeks, they weren't paying. And I, you know, I'm like, "What gives, guys?" And the answer was, "Well, there was an accident that involved a murder." I'm like, "No, it wasn't a murder.

She was killed. It was an accident." It's like, "Well, no, we are going to charge the driver with negligent homicide." So the next thing you know, my buddy is being, you know, going into state to attend court proceedings because his girlfriend's family were obviously completely distraught with everything that had happened.

I mean, I get that. But they were throwing all the blame on him, which I don't know if -- I don't -- I would not say that was his fault at all. I mean, I was in the car, but they wouldn't let me testify in court. They just kept wanting to throw it on him.

And because there was this pending murder case, that's how they classed it, homicide, they wouldn't pay my medical costs. So eventually that case was dismissed as you would expect it to be. And then at that point I had already engaged with a lawyer to say, "Hey, you guys better pay my medical." And, of course, now there was litigation, so they wouldn't pay me either.

And this went on for eight years. I had no covered medical for eight years while I was waiting for all of these things to blow out. And meanwhile I got sick and tired of waiting around. I got remarried. I had a daughter. I wanted to give my family a better life.

I couldn't do it in Australia. It just wasn't economically feasible. And the dot-com boom was calling. So we all got on a plane and came to the United States and landed, and it took another three or so years before they eventually paid out on that claim. Meanwhile I come to the U.S., no health care, pre-existing condition.

I got to build everything from nothing. I mean I've literally gone from zero to millionaire to zero again, and now I entered back into the United States for a second time. And thankfully within about six years I was a millionaire again. And that was just because I was a business guy and I just don't take no for an answer.

I just wouldn't put up with being told no, no, no on everything. That just permeated into my life in money and finance, and eventually it permeated into my life in medicine. So there are a number of interesting trails we could go down. I want to talk about your financial independence journey and a little bit on your expatriation experience because that's part of this.

But let's start with the move to Mexico to get the surgery that you had recently. You came to a point, as I understand the story, you came to a point now recently where you said, "I want to get this taken care of." Were you experiencing further symptoms that were exacerbated recently somehow and that kind of pushed you over the edge or what happened?

Yeah, it did. A year ago my wife and I were just bumming around Mexico because in the summer you don't want to stay in Arizona where we live. You want to get out. So we went down to Mexico City for a week. We were in Puerto Vallarta for a week, and we were just doing the tourist thing.

I'm in Puerto Vallarta going, "You know, I just don't feel like I'm getting the Mexican experience here." So I said to - I'd watched some YouTube videos of this magical place that everybody was retiring to called Ajijic, and it was on Lake Chapala, which is in Jalisco in the center of Mexico.

It was one of these places where people could go down there and retire on the U.S. Social Security and live a rich life. I mean, they were - these people were great. I said, "I want to go there. Let's go on a bus for five hours. I don't speak any Spanish.

I don't know where I am. Let's just go." She's adventurous, so she said, "Okay, let's do that." So we get on this bus. We go to Guadalajara, and then we get an Uber up to Ajijic. I got out of the car, and I saw this beautiful little town. These people were - everyone was old.

Now, old is the subjective term, but the average age of people in Ajijic is 65. What I saw with my own eyes, and I noticed this in the first 15 minutes of being there, was that everybody was skinny, and I say skinny as in svelte. They were not overweight.

There was no obesity at all. Everybody was happy. Everybody was healthy. Everybody was social. It was like, "Oh, I want to live here." This is utopia, right? I remember we went up to the town square, and there were these people sitting on the - and nobody's afraid to talk to anybody, right?

So there's this couple of guys sitting on a park bench, and I walked past them, and I just sparked up a conversation. I said to the guy, "You know what? You look really happy. Tell me about what your life's like." This guy, who was about 70, tells me he used to live in Wisconsin, and he couldn't afford to retire in America, and he couldn't afford the healthcare, and he came here, and his life has been fulfilled, and he's been there for 10 years.

I thought, "Wow, that's a really interesting story." He says, "Yeah, because the medical is so affordable." I'm like, "What do you mean?" He goes, "Well, you can get private health coverage in Mexico for less than the cost of your deductible in America." I'm like, "Nah, come on. That might be for the citizens here, but it wouldn't be for us, you know, for expats." He goes, "No, no, no.

You can get it." He says, "Yeah, there's a public system as well, and if you get a permanent residency, the easier you get access to that," but he said, "I don't need it. I can afford to go to my doctor three times a week because, you know, I'm paying, I don't know, a couple hundred pesos, which is like 20 bucks, and he's getting all the best care proactively, and that's why they're healthy." This resonated with me.

I heard this message. We go back to Arizona, and we're back for about a year, and last March, I woke up in enormous pain from my shoulder, and I couldn't work out why, but it was really, really sore. I ended up…it dissipated after about three weeks, but it was the sort of pain that was really…and to be honest with you, I got scared because here I am going, "Well, you know, this operation was 20 years ago.

Maybe it's got like an expiration date on it. Maybe I have to get it done again," right? Maybe the pins are rusting out inside your arm. Exactly, yeah, exactly, and it's scary because you don't know, and I thought, "Oh, I've got a problem here because I don't have health coverage in the U.S.," and Australia says, "Well, once you became a nonresident for tax purposes, you don't get any health care from us either, buddy." So I'm like, "Okay, well, what do I do?" And that's when I remembered HAHEEC.

So I got on the internet, and I went to some of these expat forums of the people who live down there, and I said, "Look, does anybody down there know a good orthopod, a good orthopedic surgeon?" And everybody on the forums, and these people are getting hip replacements and knee replacements and the whole bit, and I told them what I needed, and three people gave me the same guy's name, and I thought, "That's interesting." So we ended up in June.

We're back in Mexico, and we went to Guadalajara where this doctor practices, and I went and saw him, and he speaks perfect English, and we sat down, and the nicest guy, you could never imagine a guy as nice as this, and he said, "Well, first thing we're going to do is send you for some x-rays." So okay, so he sends me.

He's in a very rich medical area, kind of like Beverly Hills almost. It's beautiful, tree-lined streets, expensive cars, the whole bit, and he says, "Go over there, two doors down. There's an x-ray clinic. Go get me some x-rays." So they took 15 x-rays, and the first thing I noticed was it cost me $15.

I thought, "What? Fifteen x-rays for $15. Okay, that's great." So we go back into his consulting rooms, and he puts them up on the wall, and he goes, "Mm-hmm, okay, well," he said, "Look, I can probably fix this. I'd have to do a complete shoulder. I'm going to have to do a total prosthetic, complete new shoulder for you, but what I can do is I can't give you any guarantees, and surgery has risks, and all the normal stuff doctors say, but I can guarantee that I can get you better motion than you've got right now.

You won't be limited in movement like you have been." And I said, "Well, okay, how much?" And so he gets the calculator out, and he runs all these numbers, and he gives you some massive number, but it's in pesos. Well, I said, "Well, you know, what's that in U.S.

dollars?" And he goes, "About 9,000 bucks." I'm like, "Are you kidding me? Of course I'm going to take that deal," right? And my wife, who's a nurse, is looking at me going, "You better take this deal." So, okay, we go ahead and say, "Sign me up, doc, when you want me," and then he puts a date on the calendar of somewhere in September and says, "Come back and see me then, and we'll get this done." He says, "Since you've decided you want to get it done, and since you're here right now, I'm going to send you three doors down the other way to this another imaging place, but they're going to do a full MRI on you." I'm like, "Okay, I've never actually had an MRI done because no one could afford it." They go down there.

I pay for it, $270 U.S. dollars for an MRI, which is pretty good. I'm in there for about 20 minutes. They took image after image after image. I go back to the doctor's office. He gets the MRI images up because now he's got the detail, and he goes, "Oh, we better get this done." I'm like, "What do you mean?" He goes, "You see that?" I said, "Yeah, what's that?" "That's a tumor." "Okay." He goes, "It's benign, so you're okay, but you've got to get this thing done.

By the way, the reason why you've been in so much pain is there's all these bone spurs on this deformed shoulder you've got that are just cutting into what's left of your muscle. If you don't get it done, you won't have any chance of getting this done properly at all." "Okay, doc, sign me up." That's where it all started.

Wow. Do you have a sense--let's go ahead and just continue it. Then in September when the date came, you and your wife went back to Mexico. Tell us about the process and your experience because you don't speak Spanish, you're not Mexican, you come from Western, white Australia and the United States, so it's not that you're spending all your time in Latin America.

What was your experience as a patient crossing that cultural divide and what was your experience? Well, the one thing that was really interesting was a different motivation that was in the spirit of what was being offered to me. You see this really quickly. There's a sense of--I guess the Mexicans would call it--the Hispanic or the Latin community would use the phrase "la familia," the family.

The one thing that's really noticeable to me is that when you go into a doctor's office or you enter a hospital or a nurse comes into your room, you have been welcomed into their family. You're like Uncle Miles who's in the family, and they're going to treat you like they were treating their uncle.

They're going to give you the best focus, the best attention, the best care, and they don't leave any stone unturned with this. And I've never experienced that before. Now, in Australia--and a lot of people have very good experiences of health care in Australia, even though it's kind of the socialized medical system and it's free.

Well, it's not free. It's taxed, but it's freely available, shall we call it. The problem is that it's rationed. And what that means is that even when you come out of a motor vehicle, horrific motor vehicle accident like I do, you don't get a private room. You're put into a ward with six other people.

And, you know, you don't get that premier level of care. If I could pay for it, I would have. But when you're, you know, lying on a stretch and no one's asking you what sort of insurance you've got, you just get shoved into the system. And, you know, don't get me wrong.

I have so many friends who are doctors, and I think doctors have the most-- they're the most admirable people. They represent, to me, the pinnacle of what we as humans can be in the world. I mean, they save other people's lives. I mean, you know, I'm a software engineer by trade.

I don't save people's lives. I mean, I'm not important. The guy who saves somebody's life, he's important. And so I raise them on high. I look at them as, you know, important people and valued people. And yet everybody I spoke to in Australia who are doctors would complain about the limited resources they were given to be able to do proper patient care.

And then in the U.S., I mean, I even was having a conversation with my physiotherapist this morning about this, and he's telling me, yeah, he says, "Yeah, I hate the medical system here. I have to do 20 hours a week of coding just to be able to put my stuff through for insurance and for, you know, all these things." He says, "I want to be helping patients.

I didn't go to medical school to become a coder." And I get that. Now, down in Mexico, they don't have to deal with that stuff. I mean, maybe they do to some degree, but it seems like patient care is the first and foremost focus, and they-- if you're willing to go in there with money and you avail yourself to the private system there, you get a hospital environment where there's no stress, there's no one running around.

When I was in hospital after the surgery, I could press a button because maybe my IV was running low, and a nurse was in my room within 30 seconds. I mean, I don't get that sort of treatment at the, you know, at the Western. I mean, this is crazy good.

Five-star first-class treatment. The hospital room, I was in a single room all to myself. It had a balcony with beautiful, you know, like tropical outdoor area. I could go out and sit in the sunshine if I wanted, like a private terrace. They treated my wife so well while she was there.

They gave her the-- we had the best food, the best coffee, the best anything you want. And it's not-- maybe that was part of the bill, but I don't think it was. I thought it was cultural. They see somebody who needs help, and they give help, and they're not motivated with their handout asking for money every five minutes or limited by some insurance company saying, "No, we're not going to-- we're going to deny that claim," or, "This is not medically necessary," or whatever.

They just do it. It's beautiful. Yeah, it's certainly-- there's so many ways that you can think about that, but I like Mexicans. I've always had good experiences in the Mexican culture, and there is certainly, as you say, in the Latin cultures, there is a greater appreciation of family and of relationship, and that does have ongoing effects in other areas of life.

And then I think also one of the challenges or one of the things I've observed-- I've never figured out why this is, but it just seems like, to me, from personal experience, it seems like you just simply get better customer service in some cultures than you do in others.

I don't think the United States is the worst place in the world, but I'll tell you, if I have the choice ever to fly on either a Latin airline or an Asian airline, I always choose that instead of an American carrier just because the experience that you get with the customer service, from the flight attendants, the way that you're treated is night and day different.

And I've heard-- I haven't really traveled in the regions of the world where they say the customer service is legendarily worse than the U.S., but it is refreshing to go into other cultures where you get much more of a sense of warmth and caring than you often do in the United States.

I would also add to that that, I mean, I've noticed this coming from Australia to the U.S. is that, you know, you go to a restaurant and the table service you get from the waiter or the waitress is outstanding, I mean, way better than we would ever get back in Australia.

I mean, it's absolutely over the top amazing. But then the motivation is they want the tip. And that's okay. I don't mind paying for quality because, at the end of the day, we all work hard. And so if we get to keep our money, we can choose where we want to spend it, and we're going to reward quality service.

That's just the free market at work. And I'm a huge free market advocate. So that, to me, is core to success here. The problem is when you don't have a free market, when it's being controlled by like a corporatized environment or it's artificially manipulated by government policy like it is, say, in medicine, and that's where things break down.

And for that reason, I came up with this sort of methodology when it comes to healthcare for myself, and I've been using it for a while, and that is to not try to think of healthcare as a one-size-fits-all system but to break it up into three segments, which I call preventative, and that's the stuff that we all have responsible for our own biology, our own bodies.

So you eat right, you go to the gym, you don't smoke, all the stuff that's good for you that we know is going to extend your life and is going to keep a high quality of life. And that stuff, look, I can go to 15 gyms within a 10-mile radius of my house, and I can choose price and quality individually.

So they all have to compete with each other, and consequently my monthly gym membership fee is fairly affordable. I can find -- you know, I can go to the country club gym if I want to spend that money, or I can go to, you know, 24-hour fitness. It doesn't matter.

I have the choice. So that's great for preventative. The second section I would call elective, and that's surgery that I'm going to choose to have on my schedule, which is what the case was with my shoulder. But it might be somebody, say, a hip, or it might be a knee arthroscopy, or it might be some other, you know, maybe cataract surgery, maybe dental.

They can choose to get that done on their schedule, and they're in control of when to get it done. And this is where I think there's a problem because 90% of the people that I've spoken to in the U.S., when it comes to elective surgery, the first thing they do is they go to their health insurance provider and find out, well, who's going to cover me for my hip replacement?

Well, firstly, here's the interesting dynamic, and I've done the math on this. An average cost of a hip replacement in the United States, and I've done research across about 10 different cases in hospitals and so on, the average cost works out to about a $50,000 cost. If you go to Mexico in Guadalajara and you go into an orthopedic surgeon's office, he will give you a menu, much like going to McDonald's, you know, you want the number two burger or whatever it is.

He will give you a menu, and he will tell you a hip replacement is $4,400 U.S. cash, and that's his fee. And if it takes longer, he eats it. You don't eat it. And when you look at that price differential, it's less than a tenth of the cost of the U.S., and all of a sudden it's like that guy, what's your business?

And the reason is you can go into that market and you can compare him against the guy next door, against the guy in the hospital over there, against the guy over here, and you can choose based on price and quality and outcomes. You can even look at Yelp reviews on surgeons down there and find out who's got the best review.

And that's important to me. Again, it's a free market which keeps competitive pricing down and quality up when it comes to elective. And insurance, who cares when it's $4,400? My deductible's $10,000. My entire shoulder replacement was less than my deductible here. So at that point, the power's back in you.

Now, God forbid you end up in an accident much like I had or you have some chronic condition, you were born with a condition, you get cancer, you have a heart attack, all those things that none of us want anybody to ever have to go through. But it's life.

We're biological entities. We have a shelf life. We are going to go through those things to some degree. And at that point, what I would say is that's the choice when you don't get to shop around for your physician or your hospital. It's like just take me somewhere and patch me up, please.

And that's going to be when you need to lean on insurance. And if we can somehow create a situation where we take control of our own preventive responsibilities and we live a good life that way, and we take control of when we need elective surgery and we're willing to pay for it ourself and we save money up to cover ourselves and we only need an insurance for adverse events, well, if you count the number of times in your life that you've had an adverse event, then all of a sudden our insurance would drop down dramatically if it only needed to cover that.

Yeah. Yeah. Do you label that as acute care? What do you use for category number three in terms of your labeling? I've been calling it adverse or chronic. Okay. Adverse or chronic, preventive, elective and adverse or chronic. Yeah, I think, and interestingly, I think that is one of the areas where the U.S.

American healthcare system really shines. I don't know this from data. This is just an impression. But it seems to me that if I'm in a car accident, I'd like to be in the U.S., right? The surgeons and the life support and systems and whatnot are world class. It seems to me that they're really world class.

And that seems to be where I think the -- where I have tremendous admiration for the medical systems, the ER surgeons, the people who are involved in that kind of high-level acute care. And the other areas seem to be -- the preventive certainly seems to be where we don't do very well as a culture, and then the elective is kind of in and of itself.

I don't know enough to categorize it on that. It is very frustrating being an advocate of free markets myself. It is often so difficult and frustrating to talk about the medical system because it's not any one thing, right, especially in the U.S. It's not a government-run, taxpayer-run system with all of the associated problems but advantages, but neither is it a free market system with all of the associated advantages.

It's like this monstrous hybrid that has a few good things and a whole lot of bad things all mixed up together. So finding solutions to that is very daunting. Well, I've always found in life that when I lose choice as a consumer or as a purchaser of something, that that's when pricing is out of control, and that's when I have really no say in the matter.

So, you know, it might be, say, my internet service provider. If I only have one to choose from, they can charge me whatever they want, and I've got no choice in the matter. I have to pay it. And it's the same with most sole source markets. They're kind of things that if you can, you want to avoid them.

You want to go to places where there's choice and price competitiveness and quality competition and all of that. And medical has so much of that except for adverse. And I think it's fair to say that adverse is not likely to be a good fit for the free market economy.

And for that reason, I do see a role of government or some third party, insurance, whatever it might be, playing a role in provision of that care as long as it's never rationed and it's not the – but there has to be conditions on this. You cannot use an emergency room as your entry into a healthcare procedure unless you need to be there because it's an emergency.

And that's where we've lost it because people who don't have insurance, who don't have, you know, money, well, they don't go to their urgent care or their local GP or their, you know, family practitioner. They go to the ER room and they end up getting between a $5,000 and $2,000 bill for walking in because they've got, you know, bronchitis that could just need some antibiotics or something.

I mean this is a drain on an industry that shouldn't be used that way. I agree. I don't know how to solve it, but what I do think is that as individuals – so I don't know how to solve the whole economy, right? But I do believe, I do trust that individuals can make intelligent decisions for themselves in the midst of it.

And so two comments. One, if I could – I was shopping health insurance prices with a health insurance broker recently, and we were talking about it just to see because I've grown rusty over the last few years on the health insurance marketplace. But I was able to work out and get one quote on a policy with one broker for something like a $100,000 deductible.

And I've forgotten this now because it's been a few months because I can't quote the prices. But I looked in and said, you know, how high could we get the deductibles? Is there anything available in the marketplace? And the best thing that I would like to see, especially for people who have money, have savings, et cetera, is you just take on preventive and elective care yourself and you self-insure through all of the even major stuff, right?

Most wealthy people, you can self-insure a $10,000, a $20,000, a $30,000, a $40,000 risk. But if you can just have that coverage from $50,000 to $5 million, right? That's the coverage that you need. And that's where insurance is the perfect fit. It's the perfect solution. That's where insurance really shines is protecting from catastrophic, very unlikely, very--well, things that only affect a few people but are catastrophes, that's where insurance is the perfect design.

And then everything else can just be out of pocket. But I think that that's only accessible to people, especially in the U.S., if they understand that there are other options. You can go to Mexico for your elective surgery. You can go to Costa Rica for your dental work. You can go to Brazil for your plastic surgery.

You can go to Malaysia for your heart treatment. And by the time that you factor in, even with all the other costs, with a lot of these things, you factor in airplane flights, you factor in hotel and lodging, there's still such a dramatic price differential that if you're paying for yourself, you definitely should consider it and price it out.

And I think this will be--it is a growing industry in my understanding, and I think it'll be a growing industry in the future. How much did you estimate your surgery would have cost you if you had just bought it in the United States? Yeah, that was a very interesting bit of research because I had no-- and this brings up a very good point about insurance versus cash.

And I think--I know in past programs you've talked about this, but it's absolutely true. In the case of medicine, being a cash customer is not an advantage at all. Right. The problem is you don't have any negotiating power on contract pricing because you're just a guy with some money in their pocket, and the medical industry sees you as a good extortion target.

They want that money and everything else you got. I mean, that's just the way it works. So in that regard, when I went shopping to try to price this surgery out-- and, look, my surgery required a total shoulder replacement. It required removal of previous work that was done, the pins.

It required a lot of cleanup work. So all of those factors were in there. I shopped around and I went online. I said, "What's the cost of a total shoulder?" And the insurance companies who negotiate down the prices will tell you, "Ah, $25,000 to $30,000, somewhere around there." That's if you've got insurance.

Well, I don't because it's preexisting. They're not going to touch it. They won't even give me access to contract pricing. I can't do anything like that. So I went back to a friend of mine who's a doctor in Southern California, and I said to him, "Look, you're on the inside.

Can you tell me what you think this procedure would cost me?" And so a day or so later, he got back to me and he said, "Yeah." I called around. I spoke to a friend of mine who's an orthopedic surgeon, and we looked at what you were doing, and we think looking at the hospital cost, the anesthesiologist, the surgical team, probably $125,000, and I was floored.

Wow. I'm like, "Are you serious?" He goes, "Yeah, that would be a normal charge for something along those lines." And so I said, "But I'm paying $10,000," and then the phone went, like, dead. Wow. He had to kind of pick himself off the floor and go, "Are you kidding?" I'm like, "No, that's what they're charging me." And this was before I had the surgery.

So the funny thing is after I'd finished the surgery and I was being discharged, they wheel you out of the hospital and they take you straight to the finance department, right, because you've got to pay the bill. And here I am with my visa card in hand, and the lady, she spoke perfect English, and she was telling me she must have lived in California for, like, 10 years and then went back to Mexico, and she was telling me about all this sort of stuff.

And so she's working on the computer and punching all these buttons, and the next thing you know she presses the button to print, and I see the laser printer spitting out, like, 10 pages of bill, everything, just 10 pages of every single thing they ever did in the hospital.

And she comes up and she gives me some huge number, and, of course, it's in pesos. Well, U.S. dollar, how much are we talking about? Now, I'd already paid $1,200 as a deposit to go in there, and the balance left over was $3850 or something like that. So let's say $5,000 for the hospital.

And I thought, "Wow, that's incredible." And I was in hospital for two nights, so three days, and all the surgical stuff and whatever. And then so I paid that, and then I got back to the doctor's office a day or so later, and he was checking on the stitches and all the stuff they did.

And I said, "Listen, I need to settle up with you. I mean, how much do I owe?" And he goes, "Well, the prosthetic, we had to buy that separately. It was all custom built, and the surgical team need to be paid. So on your way out, go see the lady at the desk, and she'll give you the bill." And here I am with my Visa card in hand again.

I go to her, and I say, "All right, how much?" She rattles off this massive number in pesos, and we worked out. The whole thing was like, I don't know, about another five grand or something, a little bit less than that. So I paid it gladly. What's scary about doing business in Mexico is they use the dollar sign exactly the same as they do in the United States.

So it doesn't say 5,000 Mexican pesos. It says $5,000. So you look at the pricing, and a lot of times there's no indication. It doesn't say USD or MEX. It just says a dollar sign and 5,000. Then you have to go and pull out your app and say, "Oh, okay, good.

This is Mexican dollars instead of U.S. dollars." I remember the first time I was in Mexico, just everywhere I'm thinking, "They use the same dollar sign. How do I know the difference?" I know. You know what's really funny? This is kind of not related specifically to the medical side of things, but you know how I paid for this?

How's that? I paid for it with Bitcoin. Really? Wow. I had done really well. I had some Bitcoin investments for a long, long time ago, and I bought a bunch of real estate when I sold it all in 2017. I had a few bits of leftover change from this sitting on a hardware wallet somewhere, and it just so happens that, I don't know, somebody blessed me with a Bitcoin and went to $12,000 again.

I said, "Well, let me see what sort of loose change I've got lying around the couch." I had enough money in Bitcoin to pay for the whole procedure. That's great. The funny thing is I said to the surgeon after the surgery, I said, "You're going to get a laugh out of this, but I'm paying for the whole thing in Bitcoin." His ears pricked up, and he wanted to hear the whole thing about it.

He says, "We need to start taking Bitcoin down here." I'm thinking, "Yeah, you do, buddy." That'd be great. That'd be great. I'd like to make good use of our time and kind of change here. The net summary, my net summary, you can say yes or no. My net summary is so far you've had a great experience.

You were able to get a quality surgery that you needed. You were able to get a great price, and things are better, and you'd do it again if you had to. Is that a good summary? Yes, sir. Absolutely. All right. That's valuable to share, and I think that there are many people who have family members and who are listeners who probably have things that they could have done.

They'd like to have that surgery. They'd like to have plastic surgery, or they'd like to have a certain procedure, like you said, a hip replacement or something done, and yet they've not thought of doing it. They know they don't have the money for it. Well, look around the world, because in today's world, you can get on an airplane, and within 24 hours, you can be on just about any corner of the globe.

It's pretty incredible. What that means is that now you have the opportunity to access these markets. What I think people are often underappreciative of is they think that they're somehow falling behind in medical knowledge in other places. In reality, sometimes it's the opposite. Sometimes you'll have great doctors and poor doctors anywhere in the world, just like with anything else, but my experience being just simply a layperson who's not really qualified to address competence has been-- I've been impressed by doctors I've met all over the world.

If you trust yourself a little bit to go with your feelings, go with whatever external data you can gather, do the reviews, et cetera, but we're in a world of increasing competition, and you can use that to have some solutions to your medical problems, especially--and you may be able to afford it if you're traveling around the world.

I remember years ago I read on Bumfuzzle, on the Bumfuzzle blog, Patrick and Ali Schulte. They were out traveling around the world for years, and they came back to the United States, and they were going to have a baby, and they didn't have any insurance, and so they went to Mexico to have the baby.

The benefits of that--and I think in her case she had a C-section--their C-section bill was, I think, $3,000. Those of us who've had babies in the United States know that if you have a C-section, you're in the tens of thousands of dollars very quickly, $20,000 to $30,000. That's just too big of a risk, especially if you're uninsured.

Obviously, I try to be a prudent person, but there have been times in my life where I'm uninsured. I've been uninsured from a health insurance perspective, and I don't think it's as big of a risk as it's often laid out to be. Certainly it's a risk, but in life we take risks.

So if you find yourself in a situation where you're uninsured or uninsurable, look around the world. If you're going to have a baby, go have the baby in Mexico. Get some immigration benefits out of it. You have a nice Mexican baby instead of just an American baby, and also it can help you to cover you.

It is really nice, especially if you're coming from a wealthy country or you're earning in American dollars in the United States or other places in the world. It's really nice to go to a place where you can have work done and not worry about what the bill is that's going to show up, because it's within your comfort level.

You can be in the hospital for days, and you're not worried about it. Now, I can't solve why that is the case in the United States, but I know I can solve it for you in some circumstances if you'll expand your ideas around the globe. Anything else that you'd like to add on medical tourism before we switch to fire, Myles?

Well, it's interesting that there are some overlaps with medical tourism and financial independence, because I would not have been able to have the opportunity to go to Mexico and do the research if I had to report for work every day at 9 o'clock. We give up so much of our freedom with this kind of social mantra of work that we lose the opportunities.

And if you only get a couple of weeks' vacation a year and you're going to spend a week of it travelling to Malaysia to get research medical procedures or something along those lines, it's very difficult to be able to achieve that. You almost feel like you're stuck in the system, kind of like a prisoner that can never get out.

And when they get out, they get drawn back in or something. It's a very, very tough world. You need to have life freedom to be able to get life in this case. It's just part of it. Otherwise, you're just going to fall back on your local hospital, your local insurance, and you won't get a choice.

Yeah, there's no question. That absolutely is one of the many costs of working, being forced to a limited constraint when you go on vacation. Everyone else is on vacation too, because especially if you have children, you're doing things on school calendars and you're limited vacation. You wind up--that's the thing about travel.

I don't know how it's extremely difficult when you're stuck in a very short vacation window to travel effectively because you wind up spending lots and lots of money to do things at certain specific times, and you've got to do everything fast, and so you wind up spending tons of money, whereas those who have built time flexibility into their life-- it can be through financial independence, it can be through self-employment, it can be through seasonal work, etc.-- you can make the money stretch much farther.

So certainly it's a good point. Miles, you call your blog Be Unconstrained, and you've got this liberty-oriented bent. I think that's why we have some things in common. How do you look at the world when it comes to your own personal liberty, and what choices are you making to expand your liberty?

Well, I'm a firm believer that the buck stops on my desk with anything I choose and decide on, so that kind of is my starting point. I also believe that--I don't know. I mean, it's very easy for people who have-- I come from a country with 25 million people living in it.

It's not a very big place, and in that sort of country, you kind of make the rules up as you go along. I haven't lived there for a long time, but when I grew up in the '70s and the '80s in Australia, there was no internet. There was no world travelers so much.

Everybody just sort of worked it out, and we were an island isolated unto ourselves, and we had to--there were rules. I mean, you know, there were government-imposed rules. There were social, cultural rules or whatever, but for the most part, everything was a pragmatic decision based on what's going to fix a problem right now or what's going to avoid one for the future.

We didn't predispose anybody's future based on education or work or whatever, and I kind of embraced that. The other thing which affected my thinking in regards to that, and particularly regarding liberty, was what I saw my father go through, and it's not a story I tell all that often, but I'll share it here.

My father worked for the same company for 40-odd years before he retired, and I remember the day he retired, he got himself, you know, the traditional gold watch and what they call a superannuation plan down there, which is like a pension, I guess, or like a 401(k) thing, and my mother and him managed to go to Europe for six weeks and had a great time traveling, as you probably would do at the end of retirement, but two years later, he died, and I had to be the guy to identify the body and bury him, and I went through that whole process, and I'm an only child, so it all ended up on my shoulders.

So, I walked through that whole process, and then, you know, you go through the scientific, pragmatic, well, what killed him? What did he die of? And the doctor said we had a heart attack and he died. Well, what we find out is that many years before that, he always had problems with his lungs.

He was always coughing, and I never really realized what it was. I just thought the guy had, you know, he was at a very young age. He was like most people in the, I guess, in the 30s and 40s. He was a smoker like everybody was back then, and I thought maybe that was something to do with it.

Well, it wasn't. He worked for a very large corporation that was nationwide in Australia that made building products, and one of the key products that they were experts in was roofing, and the particular product he was exposed to was asbestos. And so, for most of his working career in the 40-odd years he worked in this corporation, and he subscribed to the, you know, the company will always look after me and I'm a company man, and, you know, he was a very loyal employee to that.

The company screwed him over. I mean, they killed him. They didn't know they were doing it for a lot of the time, but they knew, just like, you know, how Philip Morris and all of the tobacco companies got caught out, they knew for the last, say, 10 years that they were selling that product, that it wasn't good, that it was carcinogenic, that it shouldn't have been on the market, and they eventually pulled it, and he just got the raw deal and died of asbestosis of the lung, of cancer.

And I kind of watched that, and I guess maybe I was about 20 years old when I had to, you know, put him to rest and everything, and I realized I don't want to go down that path. I don't want that to be my life. I don't want to be -- it's not about financial independence.

It's about independence. I don't want to be relying on any third party for anything. I don't want to rely on government. I don't want to rely on banks. I don't want to rely on the Federal Reserve. I don't want to rely on corporations. I sure do not want to rely on a boss who I have less respect for, you know, who's holding my paycheck above my head saying, "You better do this or you're not getting it." I mean, I don't want that life.

I want freedom. And then having made that decision, I looked at this whole social mantra, this cultural social norm that we've sold ourselves and our kids, and I realized it just didn't fit me, this go to school until you're, I don't know, 18 years old and then choose whether you want to go into the trades or you want to go back into college and then go and do another four or six or eight years more of tertiary education.

And I thought, well, that's admirable if I want to be an architect or a lawyer or an accountant or a doctor or something like that. Yeah, that works really, really well for that. But what if I just want to be me? I just want to be a human being and have a good life and look after a family.

And I'm not afraid to work hard and I'm not afraid to be smart and learn and read and study because life and education doesn't end at the age of 22. My daughter just graduated this year, and part of the reason I did my blog was more of a service to her.

I realized, you know what, I'm 54 years old. She ain't going to listen to me. She's not going to listen to my life stories and what I've learned because I'm just dad. You know, I'm not important. But what she might do is one day, maybe if I could tell everybody else this story, she might look at it then and go, hey, maybe he wasn't such a dumbass in the end anyway.

Maybe he did have something to say. Maybe the fact that he lived a life without having to work for a boss and, you know, he has his freedom. I kind of grew up with that and thought that was normal. But now I'm working for American Express every day and I'm stuck in a cubicle somewhere.

I start realizing how it's not normal. I wanted her to realize that although I put her through college and paid for her education and everything, that 85% of all of her peers walked out of that college degree with student loan debt and won't be able to participate with real estate market speculation and buy gold or, you know, invest in Japanese corporations or whatever they want to do that might be their form of risk management and asset acquisition or whatever.

They can't participate in that because they've got this albatross on their back that they can't get rid of. And that's not right because half of the degrees those kids came out with, they're never going to work in that field or they're going to come out like half of her class, graduating class of 20,000 at the University of Arizona this year, that I watched them all come out, a bunch of them got, you know, picked up by Goldman Sachs.

She did a business major. And so they're going to go to Wall Street and work for Goldman Sachs and they're going to be, "Whoa, look at me. I've, you know, got this great job." Yeah, and you've got an $8,000 a month apartment and you can't afford this and you can't afford that, but you've got this great job.

And then three or four years they're going to go, "You know, I'm miserable working on Wall Street. I want to get out of Wall Street. What am I doing this?" "Well, because I got student loan debt." "Well, because I got" -- you know, it's like at what point is this not stupid?

It's just insane to not question this and say, you know, who's responsible for you? Who makes your life choices? Is it you or is it social culture and social norms? Are your parents telling you to do these things because they really don't have the answer themselves and that they went through that process and therefore they're just trying to do the same thing for you, stay in school, get a degree, get a good job, work hard.

You know, you'll be fine. At the age of 65, you'll retire and you'll get your pension and let's God forbid hope you don't die in two years. Now, I know I'm an outlier. I know I'm really odd. But when I see people coming out of the financial independence or the FIRE movement and I understand that they're sensing something's not right and they're trying to do something atypical to break the mold, I applaud them.

I absolutely applaud them. But I also am so cautious that they don't go into the process of welcoming themselves into a cult-based, faith-oriented movement that says you too can retire at the age of 38. Because I can tell you right now, at the age of 38, you don't want to be retiring because you shouldn't be working for money.

You know, there's so many better reasons for you to work and so many better reasons for you to be a better person and to really extend yourself and it shouldn't be all about money. So if they say, "I don't want to retire early, but I want to be financially independent so I can go out there and pursue the world and be Ernest Hemingway and be Marco Polo and be these great people who travel and embrace the world and be, as I say, unconstrained and not shackled down by anything, they can have a life worth living and that's all I want and that's all I wanted for my daughter and one day maybe she'll listen.

You're in that, if you just graduated from college, you're in that time where you don't get a lot of feedback, you just got to wait. And then I think in general, at least if our experience with our parents is any indication, you start to recognize that your parents get smarter as the years go by.

So it will return. And I realize that everybody, you know, me sitting here on your podcast talking about all these things and proliferating my views on what the world is and all these sort of things, they're not going to resonate with everybody. People are going to question me and think, oh, he's an idiot, he's crazy.

Who would do those sorts of things? But I just ask somebody to look in their own backyard and question whether they're living in a house with a garage full of stuff they never should have bought in the first place or they're living a life they're not happy with. They're going to work and they're stuck in traffic, they're stuck in a gridlock and they can't seem to escape it.

So I say don't question me, question that and find out what the answer to solve that is and then you'll have your own answers and you won't have to worry about my position and stuff. It does seem obvious that on – I see examples on every hand that it's more unusual for me today to find somebody who – most people that I meet question.

Everyone feels like something's wrong, right? Something's wrong with the way that our modern society is fracturing people up, is pushing people into certain lifestyles that are just fundamentally in some ways unhealthy for humanity. And so everybody's looking for solutions to some of these problems and some people find financial solutions, some people find religious solutions, some people find familial solutions, but many people seem to be looking for solutions.

I'm optimistic. I think that with the ability that we have to proliferate information and ideas, from your wacky ideas to my wacky ideas, then more people are trying new things and there's never before been a time where you could be exposed to more interesting, innovative ideas, whether that's to live in the city, live in a van, make half a million dollars and retire, or that's move to the country, live in a self-built hut and retire that way or in almost any permutation thereof.

So I am excited that I do see a major groundswell of interest in these topics and looking for solutions. But I just want to close this out here by simply saying, being a man who retired at 32, went from zero to hero, then back to zero, then over the years building up another portfolio, as you said, 54 now, your daughter's graduated from college, that puts you in a new phase of life.

Where do you think you'll go from here and why? Well, I don't really have, I'm very lucky. I learned this trick many years ago, which I call financial sustainability. And it's the ability for you to earn money when you're asleep and to make sure that the amount of money that you're earning, and people call that passive income, but I do it through real estate or I do it through vending machines or other forms of investments which generate income on their own.

I don't rely on Wall Street or stock markets or anything like that. I do everything under my own control. But I've created a situation where the amount of income that I bring in every month is equal to my burn rate, what my cost of living is. So I live neutral.

I don't have any costs. I don't need to work. I choose to because there are certain projects in the world that I really want to embrace. As I get older, I notice my assets grow and they've grown to the point now where I could just sell everything up and go and live on an island somewhere, I guess, but that would be very boring.

What I'm starting to see is that there's a role for me that isn't about choosing something to do that has a dollar sign attached to it. It's about an ability to give back. And my wife is very much of the same belief. We both were raised as Christians and we're both of the belief that you give when you can.

And in our particular case, we find ourselves in a place where we're lucky. We've paid our house off. We've got some rental properties. We've got income. Our daughter's already finished college. We don't need to work, but we still have that yearning need to be of service. And so one of the things we discovered in our recent trips, we were down in San Miguel in Mexico and meeting up with a bunch of other expats, which I absolutely enjoyed.

It was fantastic down there. But we found places where they were providing service back to the community. There's a long tradition of that down in that town. And we sort of thought, you know what, there's a role for us here. My wife is a wonderful clothing designer, and she wants to be able to do work with the local communities of artisans and to encourage people who may not have financial wherewithal.

Or she wants to go and volunteer at an orphanage down there and work. What I discovered was that with my work in the computer industry, I do a lot of work with school districts, and they turf out thousands of two-year-old laptops onto the auction market, and I happen to have an inroad to that.

So my goal is to buy pallet loads of these computers and ship them down there and start a little operation where I can refurbish these machines and give them out to kids and teach them how to use technology. I want to give back. I don't want money. I don't need money.

But I need something that is more -- I have to transcend that. I have to -- I'm like Maslow's hierarchy of needs. I want to get to the top here. And the best thing I can do is I have to give back. It's my turn to give back now.

Yeah, as it should be. Absolutely. Miles, thank you for coming on. I've enjoyed your writing. I thank you for reaching out to me and interacting with me online. That was how we developed a relationship. And I'll just point out to you that the way that Miles wound up on Radical Personal Finance today, I get -- just so you know -- I mean, I would imagine -- I don't know if you know or not, Miles, but I get lots and lots of requests every single day from people who are asking me to be on Radical Personal Finance.

I just ignore them all. I ignore them all. But what I don't ignore is when people actually engage with something. And so the way that you ended up here today having this conversation was that you started reaching out to me. We started chatting back and forth on Twitter, copied me on some of your articles, started reading your articles, enjoyed it, and enjoyed your story.

And then over time, that led to you wrote me an email and said, "Hey, would you like me to come on and tell the story? It's a story that fits the audience." And that's why I had you on. So you're doing a masterful job with your marketing there. Tell my audience.

Beunconstrained.com. You also have a podcast. The podcast is a blog, and feel free to share anything else that you think my audience would be interested in, please. Yeah, I'm cursed by the -- I talk too much. So I thought, "Hey, why not turn that into a podcast?" So, yeah, I created a podcast about probably three or four months ago called The Unconstrained Podcast.

And my goal was to talk about the methods and techniques that I've used that have got me to where I am and to try to create a sense of community where others that are on the same path can tell their stories and can tell their wins and their failures because I think community is what it's all about.

I'm a big believer in decentralization and to make everything a local experience, and podcasts gives you that opportunity. So, yeah, The Unconstrained Podcast and all the links to it are at beunconstrained.com. They're on iTunes and Google Podcasts and Stitcher and all that stuff. Thank you for coming on and telling us your story today.

I appreciate it very much. You're very welcome. I enjoy your show every week, and I look forward to all the episodes, too. Sweet Hop is an online marketplace curating the best in premium seating at stadiums, arenas, and amphitheaters nationwide. With Sweet Hop's 100% ticket guarantee, no hidden fees, and the personal high-level service you expect with a premium purchase, you can relax knowing you'll receive the luxury experience you deserve.

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