DIY: MONEY-SAVING SURVIVAL

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Submitted Date 01/20/2020
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DIY: Money-Saving Survival

One of the best ways to save money is to do things yourself, that is do things that other people pay for such as plumbing or construction or car repair.

With Do It Yourself (DIY) you are in a sense paying yourself to do work. And since you are not paying someone else to do the work for you, since no money has changed hands, you don't have to pay taxes on the money that you did not spend.

To take a simple example: If you pay someone to clean your house you have to pay taxes on the money that you earned so that you will have money to pay the house cleaner who might charge $30 an hour or more. If you do the work yourself you are in a sense paying yourself instead.

Now having said that, there are ways you can get into serious trouble. Plumbing is the classic one. Plumbing does not look that difficult, but doing your own repairs can get you into deep water very quickly. Everyone has a story of a simple plumbing repair that ended up flooding a basement, which then required a call to a plumber who charged a lot to repair a bad repair.

So with DIY you need to be realistic and know your strengths and weaknesses. It is very easy to get over your head very fast.

I have learned all of these lessons the hard way. Here is an example from my own life.

When I put myself through graduate school, I lived way out in the country. Country living was cheaper than living in the city, but at the same time, I had to drive in every day and keep my car and my wife's car in good repair.

Back in the day, there were a number of common fuel-efficient cars that were fairly easy to work on. I settled on Plymouths and Dodges that used a Chrysler slant-6 engine which was good on mileage and also could run for hundreds of thousands of miles. Also, parts for these cars were not expensive or hard to find.

Over the years I bought a number of these cars. And because I lived in the country, I would retire a car behind an old building when one vehicle finally broke down and hit the dust. But its days were not over, far from it.

Several standard things gave out in these cars such as the water pump or the starter or the alternator or the distributor or the headlights or the brakes. (And remember there were no YouTube videos I could look at back then.) I slowly learned how to replace each one of these which was fairly simple. I often just took one part out and replaced it with a new part.

As I said when one of my cars 'died' I retired it behind an old tobacco barn and kept a note of the repairs I had done on that particular car. So when the starter failed in my latest running car, I simply took it out of my retired car and replaced the starter in my running car. After several years I could do this in less than an hour.

Since I was living in the country it helped me in a number of ways. I did not have to take my car into town to get it repaired which usually meant that I had to leave the car overnight and get a ride back to my home and then return the next day. The repair bill at a shop was often in the hundreds and the repair shop also charged more for the parts than I paid when I bought them myself. And when I had enough experience, I trusted my own workmanship more than that of another mechanic.

I used this method for over fifteen years and became quite good at diagnosing my cars. If a starter was about to fail I could repair it in time so that I would not be stranded.

Eventually, as I became surer of myself, I learned to do more complicated repairs such as rebuilding the brake cylinders and brake pads and replacing the rear axle bearings. Once I did get over my head when I decided to replace the ball joints in the front wheels. I eventually was able to fix the car but it took me days and I never attempted that again. That was definitely a job for a shop.

There were other benefits as well. I got very good at diagnosing car problems and I learned my way around repair shops and auto parts stores. Now, today, that I don't do most of my repairs, I find that I nevertheless get much better service from a repair shop because I can speak the lingo and I can understand what they are telling me about the mechanics of my car. This also avoids bogus repairs and sky-high bills.

So how much money had I saved? A friend of mine who worked at a bank and did a lot of his own car repairs and who was good with numbers said I probably saved well over today's equivalent of ten thousand dollars. And since I was putting myself through graduate school, this made all the difference in my finances not to mention having reliable transportation to get to school every day on time.

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