DIY= Do It Yourself!
For the past weeks you’ve been bombarded by corporate Amerika with it’s offers of “discounts” on their worthless junk you don’t need anyway. You’d love to do your part to keep the economy pumped up and help put off the dreaded recession, or worse yet depression. But drowning under oceans of student loan debt your consumer credit is limited to high interest credit cards, and you’re maybe having to use them to buy groceries. $500 cell phones, $50,000 new “cars”, and half million dollar “starter homes” you can only dream of. Don’t waste your energy.
Been there, done that, got tools, read manuals, and told the “consumer” economy to go to hell!
Helped that I was raised by some compulsive DIYers, some of whom even turned pro and fixed other folk’s stuff. Heck, I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for my grandpa’s makin’ a DIY incubator out of a light in a shoe box to keep my premie mom alive, a quarter century later grandpa helped me survive a 104+ degree fever by calmly placing me in a tub of carefully warm but not cold water. When little work was available during the depression, they put themselves to work adding a basement, porch, kitchen, garage, and another bedroom to a tiny old house.
Following that fine example here I sit in my late 60s with everything paid for cash, and enough invested to buy pretty much whatever I need for life. Between college, goofing off, and early retirement a decade ago I worked full time but 25 years in my life. Heck, I’ve probably worked longer DIYing than I did for pay!
Three of my first jobs were in the auto parts and repair business at a Chevy dealer, Sears Auto Center, and a Mercury dealer. Wages ranged from minimum up to almost half the hourly labor rate for skilled techs at the Mercury dealer, a union shop. And those techs only got paid the “book time” when work was available, and “house” and warranty work paid less. Yup, at the peak of the middle class in the late 60s skilled union techs were getting only half what the customer paid at best. Today it’s even worse, with more nonunion shops and more work being shifted to lower paid less skilled labor. While the typical auto dealer if billing over $100 an hour, much of the work is being done by barely trained kids paid less than $10 an hour. I quickly figured out that I could make a lot more fixing my own stuff rather than letting the shop “fix” it or prematurely replace it.
You are worth more... Put yourself to work and enjoy better “pay”!
Our biggest expense is housing… You can play their game and make payments on that expensive house in the ‘burbs for years, or worse yet a condo in a fashionable urban ‘hood. Or you can buy the small town house next to mine, minimum bid $800 and about a couple thousand assessed for the new septic system that can probably be spread out over several years on the property taxes. Was lived in until the owner passed 4 years ago, heirs abandoned it… A little work and you’ve got a home with no mortgage. Paid $40,000 for my current home which replaced a 130 year old one I inherited from grandma and fixed up, my winter home in Florida cost $10,000 and the lot rent is $1400 a year plus CPI for the 70 odd years left of the 99 year lease.
Same with cars, computers, everything else expensive. Buy no more than you need, DIY repair it, and wring every last year of use out of it. Spent half of yesterday doing the first service on my new John Deere tractor, dealer wanted hundreds of dollars for what cost me $60 in materials and a couple hours work between long relaxed breaks. Did a 10,000 mile service on the ‘03 TDI day before, why spend $200 at the dealer when I can do the same job in less time than it takes to drive there and back and $30 for oil and filter? Manager of an Apple Store told me this 3 year old MacMini is obsolete and should be replaced anyway after his “genius” managed to wipe the hard drive doing an OS “upgrade”, I brought it back to life using a $20 128 gig thumb drive to boot off of.
Until the corporate economy pays us what we’re worth, let’s build our own DIY economy!