Fabulous Frugal Finds

Frugal Tip: Don’t Pay an Expert for Something You Can Do Yourself

I’m really fortunate that my husband is pretty handy around the house – he is great at home renovation and with a previous career as an apprenticing electrician, he can transform a room and we can stick to a budget not having to hire out.  I realize that not everyone is as lucky, and when it comes to home and appliance repair a lot of us get stumped!

Appliance repairs in particular can be costly, especially when you consider that many repair technicians charge $45-$70 just when they walk in your door!  Our dishwasher broke down on us last fall and we were stuck debating whether to attempt to fix it ourselves (costly parts) or call in a plumber that would cost us even more.  In the end we ended up with a new dishwasher when we weighed out the price of calling in a plumber (after my husband gave up trying to figure out the problem on his own) against the price of a new dishwasher on sale.

I wish we had known about places like EasyApplianceParts.com – a site where you can enter in the model number of your appliance and find specific parts to order yourself.  You can also browse by product type, then brand, and find what you’re looking for.  The site also offers helpful repair tips for common appliances – again, I wish we had known about this site when the water wouldn’t drain out of our dishwasher because there’s tons of info there!

Still unsure if you can really do it?  Consider these survey results EasyApplianceParts.com customers:

~ Almost 80% of repairs require only 30 minutes (and 50% take less than 15!)
~ Fridges tend to break the most – the average cost to repair them using parts from EasyApplianceParts.com is around $48
~ On a 5 point scale, 88% of people said that their DIY repair was “Really Easy” – only 2% of people said it was “Very Difficult”

Check out EasyApplianceParts.com and bookmark it…sadly when you least expect it is when you need a site like this.

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