Basic Skills: Without Them, You’re Broke(r)

This last week marks four separate instances of something that has broken here at the house which I could have “called someone” and would have likely cost me a ton of money during the last few months — but in each case the cost of the repair was either nothing or just a few dollars.
The first was my oven, right around the holidays. It stopped heating, which is a real bitch when you’re in the middle of making food. Usually that’s the heating element, which is typically $25 or so to buy (and can be changed by anyone who can successfully use a screwdriver in under 30 minutes.) The element in this case was in fact bad, but in addition there was a fuse in the back of the oven which had also “cooked.”
It didn’t fail from overcurrent (a short) it failed from a bad connection which heated it up enough for it to pretty-much catch the fuse holder on fire. Cost of the repair? $5 for a new fuse holder and $25 for a lower element. The “snowflake” solution would have been to buy a new $1,000 range/oven combination.

This post was published at Market-Ticker on 2017-03-09.