An Easy Way to Save

An easy way to save money – fix things yourself!

It is obvious that in university, people will play sports indoors, wrestle indoors, throw things, and goof-off. Along with this comes the unfortunate occurrence of holes in the drywall of your residence. After a few crazy nights, and three gaping holes in our walls, my roommates and I quickly learned how to patch drywall. The university charges $150 per hole to have them fixed and quite frankly, we as university students could not afford that.

We went to the hardware store and bought a can of drywall filler for $5.00 and a spreader for $1.00. None of us knew anything about drywall, but we heard it was quite simple; all you have to do is spread some filler over the hole, smooth it out, and you are done. That is exactly what we did, and fortunately it looked great. Shortly after, we went around and patched all of our friends holes, saving ourselves tons of money, and the final count of holes filled that year was 16. At $150 per hole, that is a lot of money saved.

So why are we so excited about saving money by fixing things ourselves? Because here, everything is a ripoff. Clothes and parking cost too much, roommate matching costs $50, textbooks cost a fortune. They make you buy the whole pack when you only need one of the books. They change the editions so you can’t buy used ones. And often, they require new texts with new authors so you can’t use the old ones. The profs told us this on the first day. They said “make it easier on yourself and buy the proper text or you won't be able to follow along”. Yeah well it’s not them paying for it, now is it?

Living on your own is expensive. My dad thinks we have it easier than others because residence is paid for. But one of my friends is in an apartment and he pays $300/month. I pay $700/mo for my share and it’s $2100 total for our whole unit which three of us share.

Next year I will live off-campus for sure. I know I will have to pay for my own groceries whereas now, I have a meal plan. But I still think it will be a lot cheaper.

So yes, I am happy when I can fix things myself. Maybe I should start a business doing just that.