I've used personal VPNs that cost $6/month, operate in other countries and promised not to keep logs of activities; they had various software options including OpenVPN which is free and pretty easy to set up. Of course you can never tell. Reportedly 1/3 of all child porn sites in the dark web are honey pots run by law enforcement to identify and capture pedophiles. There is no knowing if your VPN company is legit or someone tricking you into handing over the keys to the castle. In general I would trust a foreign company more than US since American ISPs and companys often hand over data when requested instead of demanding a court order.

Since most websites that handle sensitive information use https you should be safe using them even on insecure networks.

This is what attracts me to hosting my own server. I at least 'think' I know what is happening with my data - understanding it can still be subpoenaed or apparently just requested.

Should have mentioned that I am not looking to do anything illegal - more just concerned about the relative safety of my data (health, wealth, personal) as I start to see more presentations on 'big data' and was spurred by recent changes to ISP requirements.

The purpose of a VPN is that all the traffic from your home, though your ISP (Comcast, ATT, etc), only goes to your VPN's servers. That way, your ISP can't tell what sites your are visiting, or your work can't block you from going to a particular site, because you are always just visiting 1.