It is really easy to accidentally get wax on plastic details of your car such as door handles, and it seems like nothing will take it off. It turns out there is an incredibly simple solution - just use an eraser! I tried it on my car, and it worked perfectly. I had the best luck using a very soft eraser, but it also ate up the eraser pretty quickly.
Time required: <10 minutes
Cost: free
Tools required: Eraser
I think that one of the biggest problems people have when it comes to budgeting their money wisely is that they are not aware of how much they are spending until it is too late. I have a simple method for watching how much money I spend and making sure I have enough for essential expenses and building savings.
Step 1: Estimate your regular monthly expenses
The only expenses I put into this category are my rent and utility bills. Anything you have to pay on a regular basis goes into this total. We’ll worry about expenses such as food and gas later. Credit card payments go here if you have a large balance to pay off. Make sure you allocate at least enough for a minimum payment, and more if you can.
Your utilities will obviously change by a little bit each month, but it doesn’t matter. After adding up normal expenses, round up. My rent and utilities come out to about $450 in the worst months, so I use $500 as my number.
Step 2: Estimate your monthly income
This step is easy. Add up whatever money you get in your paychecks each month. If your hours fluctuate some months, pick the smallest reasonable amount you can expect to make. We want to make sure you don’t run out of money, so round down to a nice number. This will help make sure you have extra money left over each month. As a student worker, I make about $1050 a month, so I round to $1000.
Step 3: Figure out how much to save for your monthly bills
All you do here is figure out what percentage of your paycheck has to go towards bills. $500 / $1000 = .5, or 50%, so half of my paycheck is dedicated to bills. I keep track of how much money in my account is dedicated towards bills and how much is free, but if you don’t trust yourself not to touch it, or simply don’t want to have to keep track of as much, open a new checking account. Most banks offer free checking accounts if you give up interest. When you cash your paycheck, make sure that the right amount goes into your bill payment account. Don’t touch this money for anything other than paying the bills you counted up in the first step.
Step 4: Use leftover bill money to pay off debt or invest
Because you overestimated the cost of your bills and underestimated your income, you should have money left over in your bill account after paying all of your bills. If you have credit cards to pay off, put all of this money toward them. Having no credit card debt will greatly reduce your financial burden. If your credit cards are paid down, then invest in a retirement plan. The key is that this excess money was already allocated to bills, so you won’t miss it when it goes towards credit cards or investments. I tend to have about $75 left over in this account each month.
Step 5: Monitor your daily expenses
Anything that wasn’t covered in step 1 has to come out of the rest of your paycheck. The two biggest things in this category for me are food and gas. I don’t have a set strategy for budgeting this money, but knowing how much you have left and how long it has to last you helps keep you from overspending. Because you can’t touch the money saved for bills, you know you can safely use all of the other chunk of your paycheck however you want, as long as you have enough to get by till your next paycheck.
If you have trouble keeping track of how much money you have left, you could try only using cash. I don’t like to carry that much cash around, but it does give you a nice visual way of telling how much you have gone through.
Step 6: Save the leftovers
When you get a new paycheck, take whatever money is left for your daily expenses and put it in a savings account or towards credit cards or retirement. If you let it accumulate with the rest of your daily expense money, you will be tempted to overspend next pay period. I make it a goal to have at least 10% left over at the end. This makes it feel less like you are living paycheck to paycheck and helps build savings faster.
When the drain in your bathroom sink starts running slow it is usually because of a clog in the drain pipe under the sink. Although a lot of people will buy a drain cleaning solution and pour it in the drain, chemicals tend to simply clear a path wide enough for them to drain out. Your sink will run fine for a little while, but it won’t be long till that tiny channel gets clogged up again. Cleaning the drain out properly takes less than 10 minutes and requires no tools other than a bucket and maybe a wrench, so you can stop wasting money on barely effective chemicals.
The steps:
1. Take everything out from under the sink. If you do it right, you won’t spill anything, but it is a good idea to get everything out of there just in case.
This shows you everything you’ll need to work with under the sink:
The bottom of the trap fills with water, so gases from the sewer line can’t leak up through your drain. However, because it creates a low point in the drainage line, dirt and hair can build up in it, leading to a clog. It is designed to come off easily to allow cleaning. This one is held on by slip nuts that can be loosened by hand, but older ones may be metal and require a pipe wrench. Although the trap seems like the obvious place for a clog, the assembly for the pop-up drain tends to catch most of the hair that goes into the drain, and is the most likely place to find a clog. The pivot nut holds the assembly together, preventing you from simply lifting the plug out of the drain to clean it.
2. Put a bucket under the trap. Make sure it is pretty wide, so you don’t have to worry about lining it up perfectly.
3. Remove the trap. You should be able to just loosen the slip nuts and it will come right out. It will be filled with water, which will pour out as you loosen the nuts.
4. Check the trap for clogs and clean it if necessary. Once it is clean, set it aside; we still have to clean the pop-up assembly, so we’ll put everything back together at the end.
5. Remove the pivot nut. Once you have loosened it, you can pull back on the rod until it comes free of the drain pipe. The end that was in the pipe goes through a hole in the pop-up plug, forcing it and the lever to move together. This nut had an integrated seal, but yours may have a washer or two in it. Make sure you don’t lose these, as it may be hard to find a replacement.Sorry for the blurry picture, it was dark under the sink, so I needed a long exposure to get the picture. Apparently I’m no good at holding a camera steady.
6. Remove the plug. Now that the pivot lever is removed, you should be able to just pick it up out of the sink. It will look disgusting and be covered in hair and black slime - this is where most clogs happen. Clean it off really well. Because the trap is still removed, you should be able to look down the drainpipe to see if there is anything bad stuck in the pipe itself that needs cleaned. While the plug is removed it is a bad idea to run water in the sink, since it can shoot out of the small hole and miss your bucket.
7. Put it all back together. When you drop the plug in, make sure the hole is lined up so the lever under the sink can slide back into it. Put the lever back in, and tighten up the pivot nut. It doesn’t have to be too tight, just firm enough that it feels solid. The same goes for the nuts holding the trap on. Once it is all back together, test the plug to make sure it moves properly - it should actually work better than before because the clog is gone.
8. Test it out. Run some water in the drain to make sure it goes smoothly and doesn’t leak. If it does leak, then you just need to tighten up the nuts a bit more. Running the water also fills the trap back up to keep that nasty smell in the sewers where it belongs.
Summary:
Time required: <10 minutes
Cost: free
Cost to have someone else do it: From the quotes I have seen online, a plumber would cost about $40. Draino, which is not as effective as a proper cleaning, costs about $6.
Tools required:
