The Financial Trap of Buying Your Way Out of Life’s Little Challenges by Trent Hamm
It's easy but expensive to pay someone else to solve your problems. Challenge yourself to take care of things on your own for a month. A few weeks ago, someone close to me was driving home from work when suddenly one of their tires blew out. At that point, this person had some options. They could try to change the tire themselves and drive on their spare tire for a while. They could call a friend. Or they could call a roadside repair service. (It was a reasonably cold day, but not so cold that one couldn’t stand outside for a while, so the weather wasn’t an issue.) In this situation, my friend ended up choosing to call a roadside repair service. The service ended up costing about $100 and the total wait time was about an hour or so. Even worse than that, the tow truck pulled into a tire shop that my friend didn’t normally do business with, where they were able to charge quite a bit for the tires. Now, let’s compare that to what would have happened if the per...