Most people buy insurance from whoever they saw in the last commercial - an agent who can only sell one company's policies. For more than 15 years, I've done it differently: I use independent agents who shop the whole market for me. It has saved us real money and a lot of hassle, across homeowners, auto, a specialty vehicle, term life, and a stack of business coverage.

Several carriers' quotes for the same home and auto, laid side by side - one agent comparing them all is the whole point of going independent.

Captive vs. independent

A captive agent works for one carrier. If that company hikes your rate at renewal, the agent can't do much - their only product just got more expensive.

An independent agent represents many carriers at once. When your rate jumps, they re-shop it across all of them and move you to whoever's best right now. Same agent, same phone number, no starting from scratch.

The online quote sites that promise the world

You know the pitch: enter your info, get an instant quote, switch in fifteen minutes. I've had horrifically crappy experiences with most of these sites. They dangle a fake number to get you in the door, and then the real quote - the one after they actually look at your situation - is a completely different, much higher figure. It's depressingly silly.

That's also why I've never bought from Progressive or GEICO. I've checked them plenty of times; their rates were just never the best for me. Nothing against them - the point is you can't know who's cheapest for your house, your cars, and your driving history until you actually put them all side by side. Everyone should shop around. An independent agent is simply the most efficient way to do it: dozens of carriers, one conversation.

The rare online experience that actually worked: The Zebra

The big exception was The Zebra. They behaved like an independent shop instead of a bait-and-switch funnel. I used them for homeowners (they do auto and more too, but homeowners is where they earned it for me). We ran through something like a hundred questions - thorough, not a five-field teaser - and when the real quote came back it was about $18 less than the number the site first showed me, not more. After a bait-and-switch site, a quote that comes in under the estimate is almost startling. The whole experience was exceptional.

Then we adjusted some of the coverage details together and got it down another few hundred dollars. That's what a good shopping experience feels like: somebody putting the whole market in front of you and then tuning the policy to fit, instead of hiding the real price until the last screen.

A local agent I used for years: Barber Insurance Agency

For a long stretch I used Barber Insurance Agency, a local independent agency in Apex, NC that I found through Ramsey Solutions' insurance referral program. They did an exceptional job laying out the options. Because they're a local agent, I could go in in person, sit down, and walk through the scenarios - what changes if I raise the deductible, bundle the auto, add an umbrella. That face-to-face, "let's run the numbers together" experience is something no quote site replicates, and it's one of the quiet advantages of an independent agent: a real human who shops for you and explains the trade-offs.

When you own something unusual: Grundy and agreed value

Standard auto policies are built for standard cars. They pay "actual cash value" - whatever a claims adjuster says your car is worth after depreciation - which is a disaster for anything collectible, modified, or genuinely special.

I have a specialty vehicle that needed agreed value coverage: you and the insurer agree up front, in writing, on exactly what the vehicle is worth, and that's what you're paid if it's totaled. No depreciation argument, no lowball. Grundy found me a policy that covers those vehicles that way, at a genuinely affordable price. Most captive agents simply can't write that - it's not in their one company's lineup. An independent (or a specialty carrier like Grundy) is how you find the one company whose "appetite" matches your odd situation.

My supercharged Yukon Denali on the dyno - exactly the kind of modified vehicle that needs agreed value, where you and the insurer set the figure up front instead of arguing depreciation after a total loss.

The one agency that did soup to nuts: Woodbury & Co

For years I ran a lot through Woodbury & Co - they wrote pretty much every type of insurance imaginable. I used them mostly for business insurance, and for group health, dental, and vision for the team, and they were awesome to deal with. They'd also shop term life across 30 or 40 different companies to find the best rate on identical coverage. Everything, soup to nuts, under one roof. (Woodbury is now part of CRC Group.)

That's the part people miss about going independent: it's not just home and auto. The right agent becomes the single front door for almost every line you'll ever need - personal, specialty, and business - and they re-shop each one instead of letting it quietly drift up in price.

Why does an independent agent actually save money?

Every carrier has a different "appetite." One is cheap for a paid-off house, another for a household with teen drivers, another for a higher-value home, another for a modified car. You can't see that from the outside, but a good independent agent knows which company wants your business and will price it lowest. You also stop paying the loyalty tax - the slow rate creep that builds up when you never re-quote.

How to find a good one

• Look for an independent agent or broker, not a single-brand office.

• Ask how many carriers they write, and whether they automatically re-shop at renewal.

• Bring your current declarations pages so they can quote apples-to-apples.

• If you own something unusual - a collectible, a modified vehicle, a small business - ask specifically whether they can place specialty and commercial lines, or know a specialty carrier who can.

Fifteen minutes with the right agent can quietly save you hundreds a year, every year, for coverage that actually fits.

Key takeaways

• A captive agent sells one company; an independent agent shops dozens, so when your rate jumps they move you instead of shrugging.

• Most online quote sites bait you with a fake low number and reveal the real (higher) price later - shopping the whole market avoids that game.

• The Zebra was the rare exception: a thorough quote that came in ~$18 under the teaser, then a few hundred lower after tuning the coverage.

• A local independent agent (I used Barber Insurance Agency in Apex, NC, a Ramsey Solutions referral) lets you sit down in person and walk through scenarios.

• Specialty vehicles need agreed value, not actual cash value - Grundy wrote that affordably when a standard policy couldn't.

• One independent agency can cover soup to nuts: home, auto, specialty, term life shopped across 30-plus carriers, and business lines like workers' comp and health.

Frequently asked questions

What's the difference between a captive and an independent agent?

A captive agent represents one insurance company and can only sell that company's policies. An independent agent represents many carriers, so they can compare prices across all of them and move you to whoever is cheapest for your situation - now and at every renewal.

Are online quote sites like The Zebra worth it?

Most quote sites show a low teaser number and then quote you something much higher once they have your details. The Zebra was the exception for me: a thorough hundred-question homeowners quote that actually came in about $18 under the estimate, and a few hundred dollars lower after we adjusted the coverage. The lesson isn't "use one site," it's "shop the whole market" - which is exactly what a good independent agent does.

Why not just use Progressive or GEICO?

No knock on them - I've checked their rates many times and they simply were never the cheapest for me. You can't know who's lowest for your specific home, cars, and history until you compare them all side by side, which is the whole point of going independent.

What is agreed value insurance and who needs it?

Agreed value means you and the insurer agree in writing, up front, on exactly what your vehicle is worth, and that's what you're paid if it's totaled - no depreciation fight. It matters for collectible, classic, or modified vehicles that a standard "actual cash value" policy would badly underpay. Specialty carriers like Grundy write it; most single-brand auto agents can't.

Can an independent agent handle business insurance too?

Yes. A full-service independent agency can cover workers' comp, group health, dental, and vision, and shop term life across dozens of carriers - alongside your home and auto. One agency I used (Woodbury & Co, now part of CRC Group) handled all of it under one roof.

Have you ever switched to an independent agent, or gotten burned by a bait-and-switch quote site? Let me know in the comments.

What $10,000 in each of these became over a decade, June 2015 to June 2026

Day trading is a full-time job. Options trading is another full-time job. Both will happily eat your evenings, your nerves, and usually your money.

Long-term investing is the opposite. You put money in, in a boring and diversified way, and you let it ride. You shouldn't be trading. You should be investing. You look at it in five and ten years, not five and ten minutes. And when you finally look back, you can have a literal fortune.

That's the whole game I play. I'm not a trader - I'm a long-term stock market investor, and these days that's where almost all of my focus goes. It's simple, it's about as passive as money gets, and the math has been hard to argue with.

Rule one: show me a ten-year chart

Whenever someone wants to talk investments with me, I say the same thing: let's look at a chart.

Most people want to talk about how a stock makes them feel, or that it was "up like 40% last year." I don't really care about any of that. One year is noise. Feelings are not a strategy. Pull up a five or ten year chart. If we can get both things we're comparing onto the same chart, great. If we need two charts side by side, fine. But we are looking at five to ten years, period.

And look at the right number. I send people to ETFreplay because it charts total return with dividends reinvested - the actual number you'd have in your account. Google Finance and Yahoo Finance mostly show price only, which quietly ignores dividends. That is idiotic, because total return with dividends reinvested is the only number that really matters. Everything below comes from one ETFreplay chart, June 2015 to June 2026.

Quick disclaimer before the specifics: I'm not a financial advisor and none of this is financial advice. It's just what I do with my own money. The leveraged funds near the end are genuinely risky - do your own homework.

Everyone's base should be the S&P 500

If you do nothing else, own the S&P 500 through a dirt-cheap index fund. I use IVV, the iShares Core S&P 500 ETF, at a rock-bottom 0.03% expense ratio. For most people this should be 70 to 90% of the whole portfolio. It is the base. Everything else is garnish.

Here's why I'm so boring about it: over the past decade, that "boring" S&P 500 fund turned $10,000 into about $42,000 - up 325%, dividends included. You more than quadrupled your money for doing nothing but owning the whole American economy and waiting.

It's also my favorite filter for any "exciting" opportunity. Real estate, crypto, whatever the new fad is - I compare it to what the S&P 500 did over the same window. If it didn't beat the index after all its extra risk and headache, then the index was the better call. Most of the time, it was.

A modest tilt toward tech

With the slice that's left, I tilt toward tech, because I believe in it for the long haul. For me that's FTEC (Fidelity's info-tech ETF, 0.08%) and IGM (iShares' tech ETF). Over that same decade, they roughly doubled the index - up about 858% and 863% against the S&P's 325%. Same buy-and-hold idea, just concentrated in the part of the economy I think keeps eating the world.

The gambling sleeve: 10% or less

Now the fun, dangerous part. Everybody wants the lottery ticket. Fine - but cap it at 10% of your portfolio or less, and call it what it is: gambling.

For me that's leveraged tech: TECL (3x daily tech), TQQQ (3x daily Nasdaq-100), and one mutual fund, RMQHX. RMQHX is a 2x Nasdaq-100 fund that rebalances monthly instead of daily, and that detail matters. Its closest ETF cousin is QLD (2x daily Nasdaq-100), but QLD slightly underperforms RMQHX over time, because daily resetting bleeds more to volatility than a monthly rebalance does.

How parabolic can this sleeve get? Over a decade, the 3x tech fund turned $10,000 into roughly $687,000. The 2x monthly fund, about $238,000. Those are not typos - and that is exactly why people get seduced into putting way too much here.

Bigger returns came with bigger crashes

The catch nobody puts on the brochure

Here's what the "I turned $10k into $687k" crowd leaves out: the drawdowns.

Higher returns came bolted to higher risk, and risk shows up as how far a thing falls when the market rolls over. In the last decade we had four major market downturns plus a handful of smaller scares, and every time, the more leverage you held, the deeper the hole.

The price of admission: the worst drop from a high

The boring S&P 500 fell about 34% at its worst. The tech ETFs, 35 to 41%. The 2x monthly fund, 63%. The 3x daily fund fell 78% - it lost more than three-quarters of its value at the bottom. If you can't watch part of your money do that without panic-selling at the worst possible moment, you have no business owning the leveraged stuff. That is the entire reason it is capped at 10%: so a gut-wrenching drawdown there can't sink the whole plan.

The "decay" lecture you can ignore

You will meet a certain kind of person who cannot talk about leveraged ETFs without a ten-minute sermon on "daily rebalance decay" and "volatility drag." My blunt take: it mostly does not matter. Look at the chart.

Yes, the decay is real, and yes, it bites hardest when the thing is crashing - that 78% drop above is exactly what it looks like. But that is the whole reason this stuff lives in the 10% gamble sleeve and nowhere near your base. Inside that sleeve, over a long enough window, you do not argue with the theory - you look at the results. And the result was $10,000 becoming roughly $687,000.

The drawdowns are extreme; I will not pretend otherwise. But the long-run return is not touched by anything else on that chart. The decay did not stop it - and a decade of real results is a lot harder to argue with than a forum post about decay.

The playbook, in one breath

A big, cheap S&P 500 base. A modest tech tilt if you believe in it. A tiny, clearly-labeled gambling sleeve you could lose without losing sleep. A five-to-ten-year horizon. And the discipline to do almost nothing.

That's the whole thing. You shouldn't be trading - you should be investing. Put the money in, diversify, let it ride, and look back in ten years.

Want to run the numbers yourself? Here's the exact chart - total return, dividends reinvested, June 2015 to June 2026.

What's your base, and has anything "exciting" you've owned actually beaten the S&P 500 over ten years? Tell me in the comments.

My minivan's odometer at 333,333 miles - six threes

Next time you think your new car is cool, remember: some guy is out there daily-driving a minivan with 342,000 miles on it.

That guy is me. I caught the photo above at exactly 333,333 miles - six threes - and I've driven another 9,000 since. We bought it used 14 years ago. It's still the daily driver and still the road-trip hauler.

Here's the part that actually matters.

The dream car I sold at 23

At 23, I bought my dream car: a 2002 Pontiac Trans Am WS6. I could barely cover the payment, insurance, gas, and tires, and it made no sense with three kids at home. I sold it a year later.

My 2002 Pontiac Trans Am WS6 - the dream car I sold at 23

It was the hardest "adult" decision I made that decade. It was also one of the best.

The boring decade

I replaced the Trans Am with a plain used 4-door sedan and drove it 175,000 miles over 15 years. Three of my kids learned to drive in it, and each of them drove it for a year or more as their own car - several years of first-car duty between them.

Then came the minivan: a 2009 Chrysler Town & Country Touring, bought used for $20,000, now sitting at 342,000 miles. No car payment for most of that run.

Our 342,000-mile Chrysler Town & Country, still the road-trip hauler - canoe on the roof and all

Here's a contrarian one: I've come out ahead on every vehicle extended warranty I've ever bought. The trick is to buy used cars that still qualify for the manufacturer's extended warranty - not the sketchy third-party kind - and then keep the car at least five years, so you're around long enough to actually use the coverage. Chrysler quality isn't exactly legendary, so on this van the $1,900 unlimited-mileage warranty was the single best money I've spent on a vehicle. It has covered the big, expensive failures that would have ended a lesser-kept van, no matter how high the odometer climbed.

The warranty doesn't touch routine maintenance, though, and that's the other half of the trick. I do that work myself, which has saved a ton of time and money over the years, and I film a lot of it. A couple of those repair videos have pulled 50,000+ views from other owners keeping their own vans on the road. Turns out "boring minivan maintenance" is its own little corner of the internet.

What a paid-off, long-haul car actually saves

Here's the math that makes me smile. All in, the van cost about $21,900 - $20,000 used plus the $1,900 warranty. Spread over 14 years and 342,000 miles, that's roughly $130 a month, or about 6 cents a mile, before fuel and routine maintenance.

Now compare that to the average new-car payment in America, which is north of $700 a month - and that's just the payment. Keeping one reliable vehicle this long isn't shaving a few dollars off gas; it's freeing up something close to a second mortgage payment, every month, for over a decade.

That money didn't vanish. It went into investments, into the kids, and eventually into the fun vehicles - paid for in cash.

The fun came later, and it was earned

Those two boring decisions, the sedan and the van, are a big reason my family is set up the way we are today.

The fun came later, on our terms: a supercharged Yukon Denali and my wife's lifted Jeep Wrangler, both bought as exceptional used examples that already had the upgrades, for a fraction of new. Nothing financed.

The Denali isn't shy, either: 740 horsepower at the crank, 560 to the wheels on the dyno (Whipple 2.3L blower, BTR Stage 2 cam). It runs 0-60 in about 4.5 seconds - quicker than the Trans Am WS6 I sold at 23, which did it in roughly 5.2. A three-row family hauler that outruns my old dream car. That's what the boring decade buys you.

My wife's lifted Jeep Wrangler earns its keep too: once or twice a year we take it off-road in the Uwharrie National Forest, and it handles the rough stuff exceptionally well.

The takeaway

Vehicles are money pits. They're also necessary, and they can be a blast. The trick is buying the fun one at the right season of life, so it never derails the rest of the plan.

If I could tell my 23-year-old self one thing: the Trans Am isn't going anywhere. It'll still be there in 15 years, when you can actually afford it without it costing you the house. Buy the boring thing first.

342,000 miles of proof: boring early buys you fun later.

The same van's odometer today - 342,347 miles and still climbing

What's the most miles you've ever put on one vehicle? Drop the number in the comments - I'll go first: 342,347 and counting.

These savings freed up over $15,000 per year to apply to investments, other priorities, and some travel; delivering compounding wealth, financial security, and the peace of mind that comes with it.

Beyond the dollars and cents, Medi-Share has given us incredible flexibility. I’ve switched jobs multiple times without the stress of losing health coverage or scrambling for new insurance. No more being tied down by employer plans, true freedom in a world where health care costs can feel like an anchor.

Medi-Share partners with provider network First Health. When we head to the doctor, we pay a small provider fee upfront, and the bill gets routed through the network for significant discounts. From there, we pay the discounted amounts on medical bills until we reach our Annual Household Portion (AHP) for the year. Once that’s hit, any eligible expenses beyond it are shared directly among the Medi-Share community of members.

Over the last nine years, after applying those discounts, our out-of-pocket share of medical bills, for each year, usually fell between a few hundred and a few thousand dollars, varying with our usage. The one exception was a year involving minor surgery, where we met our Annual Household Portion (AHP), and then $21,622.32 was generously shared by fellow members.

Some links below are affiliate links; I may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.

Curious to dive deeper? Learn more about Medi-Share here and see if it’s a fit for your family.

Health Care Sharing Ministries have seen tremendous growth in recent years, with recent estimates indicating that around 1.5 million Americans are enrolled nationwide. According to an analysis by the Colorado Division of Insurance, this marks a dramatic increase from fewer than 200,000 participants before 2010, as more families seek affordable alternatives to traditional insurance.

Other Health Care Sharing Ministries: Impact Health Sharing, OneShare Health, Samaritan Ministries, Liberty HealthShare, Altrua HealthShare, Christian Healthcare Ministries (CHM), netWell Healthshare, Sedera Health, United Refuah HealthShare and Zion HealthShare.

From 2008 through 2013, my business covered our family with a small group health plan featuring a $5,000 deductible, a health savings account, and 100% coverage after the deductible. It began at a manageable $565.13 per month and even dipped as low as $459.02 in 2010. But by 2012, things took a turn, our broker sent this eye-opening message:

“Under your current plan your maximum out of pocket is $5,000 and the premium is going from $479.67 to $736.21 which is $256.54 more than what you are currently paying.”

From there, costs spiraled out of control. I had two years where my employer footed the entire bill for family premiums exceeding $1,600 per month. Then, I gave a marketplace plan a shot for about six months, only to be let down by the steep costs and lackluster coverage. That’s when I made the switch to Medi-Share and I’ve never looked back.

To give you context, here’s a breakdown of the average monthly family plan premiums in North Carolina from 2016 to 2025, based on estimates for a plan with a $10,500 deductible. Keep in mind, NC has a strong preference for high-deductible health plans (HDHP) (66% of enrollees vs. 57% nationally), which helps keep averages a bit lower than the U.S. overall. However, with typical family deductibles around $3,988 (all plans) or $4,927 (HDHPs) per recent MEPS data, a $10,500 option qualifies as ultra-high-deductible territory.

And here’s the nitty-gritty on our nine-year journey – a detailed breakdown showing exactly how we racked up that $138,188.80 in savings. The first two years on Medi-share we had a $5,000 annual household portion, which is reflected in the higher rates those years.

If you’re tired of skyrocketing premiums and ready for a community-driven alternative that actually works, HCSMs like Medi-Share could be your game-changer. What’s been your experience with health care costs? Share in the comments below!