This isn't about money, drugs or really anything specific. No, I'm talking things that you have done that worked for you for just about anything. Why? Pretty simple, as we age we encounter problems that weren't problems when we were younger. I'll give a couple of simple examples but please think back & remember how you overcame the limitless challenges we all face or have faced.
First example: pulling weeds in my yard. We have animals so I hate to use weed poison. So I bought a kneeler so that I could get down & dirty & still get up (picture below). I quickly realized that it didn't work for me because besides my knees not being great, my back we even worse. BUT I found a hundred & one uses for this. Looking under stuff to find something I dropped, working low on something (like stocking a beer refrigerator - haha), lately installing weather stripping on cabinets, I use this for everything! Oh & notice that you can kneel on it & use the "handles" with your arms to help get yourself up. And turn it upside down & you can sit on it for any kind of low work.
https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/61dAD1hb-qL._AC_SX679_.jpg
Living in central Texas we get a lot of sticker producing plants. That's originally why I bought the above. But sadly my back problem came up. So simple solution is a hoe or one of those things you incircle the plant with & step on to make a nice size hole in your yard. I thought outside the box & bought a knife blade, an old broom & a bucks worth of epoxy. I basically made a spear that I use to cut plants out of my yard (picture an apple corer, that's how it works). It works great (once you get the hang of it) on anything with 1 main stem. No picture because I made it but it's like a short spear.
We have a lot of trees both over & around our house. Between wind & squirrels we get a lot of sticks in the yard & on the roof. For the sticks in the yard I bought a dollar bucket (at dollar tree) & dollar "grabber" (you know that you squeeze to pick up things on the floor/ground). Easy & quick & for bigger limbs I have a garbage can in the back yard. So how about those branches on the roof? I bought a a wide bristle floor brush (I think at dollar tree), just the head. I then bought a painter's roller extension (the longest I could find) & put them all together. You screw them together, extend the painters extension all the way & I can "brush" little limbs off the roof & often "hook" the bigger limbs with the brush & pull them down.
Here's an old one that I did years ago. Remember, my back isn't great & my wife's back, well she gets disability for her back & her knees. (And here's where you turn a minus into a plus). She told me one day that she was having some minor problems getting off the toilet. Bad back, bad knees, of course. So I asked if a taller toilet would help & she said that she thought it would. I did a little research & found that Sam's had a 3 inch higher toilet (called toilet in a box no less) for $99. I bought 2 of them, one for both downstairs bathrooms. I installed them both, pretty easy btw. I did find that I had a leaky valve in one bathroom so I called a plumber to replace it & while he was here he fine tuned my toilet install. Total cost was $210 for the plumber, & 2 toilets for $99 each., so about $400 total (with tax, etc). But it really wasn't that much because those were low flow toilets & they paid for themselves in about 2 years because of lower water bills (waters high around here).
Lastly & I have no numbers on this one. We found that GoodRX did lower our cost a LOT on a fair amount of meds.
The above was right off the top of my head but the topic is open. Anything you have done that helped you that other might not have thought of, post it here. Wouldn't it be nice to save others some money, pain or even trouble?
First example: pulling weeds in my yard. We have animals so I hate to use weed poison. So I bought a kneeler so that I could get down & dirty & still get up (picture below). I quickly realized that it didn't work for me because besides my knees not being great, my back we even worse. BUT I found a hundred & one uses for this. Looking under stuff to find something I dropped, working low on something (like stocking a beer refrigerator - haha), lately installing weather stripping on cabinets, I use this for everything! Oh & notice that you can kneel on it & use the "handles" with your arms to help get yourself up. And turn it upside down & you can sit on it for any kind of low work.
https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/61dAD1hb-qL._AC_SX679_.jpg
Living in central Texas we get a lot of sticker producing plants. That's originally why I bought the above. But sadly my back problem came up. So simple solution is a hoe or one of those things you incircle the plant with & step on to make a nice size hole in your yard. I thought outside the box & bought a knife blade, an old broom & a bucks worth of epoxy. I basically made a spear that I use to cut plants out of my yard (picture an apple corer, that's how it works). It works great (once you get the hang of it) on anything with 1 main stem. No picture because I made it but it's like a short spear.
We have a lot of trees both over & around our house. Between wind & squirrels we get a lot of sticks in the yard & on the roof. For the sticks in the yard I bought a dollar bucket (at dollar tree) & dollar "grabber" (you know that you squeeze to pick up things on the floor/ground). Easy & quick & for bigger limbs I have a garbage can in the back yard. So how about those branches on the roof? I bought a a wide bristle floor brush (I think at dollar tree), just the head. I then bought a painter's roller extension (the longest I could find) & put them all together. You screw them together, extend the painters extension all the way & I can "brush" little limbs off the roof & often "hook" the bigger limbs with the brush & pull them down.
Here's an old one that I did years ago. Remember, my back isn't great & my wife's back, well she gets disability for her back & her knees. (And here's where you turn a minus into a plus). She told me one day that she was having some minor problems getting off the toilet. Bad back, bad knees, of course. So I asked if a taller toilet would help & she said that she thought it would. I did a little research & found that Sam's had a 3 inch higher toilet (called toilet in a box no less) for $99. I bought 2 of them, one for both downstairs bathrooms. I installed them both, pretty easy btw. I did find that I had a leaky valve in one bathroom so I called a plumber to replace it & while he was here he fine tuned my toilet install. Total cost was $210 for the plumber, & 2 toilets for $99 each., so about $400 total (with tax, etc). But it really wasn't that much because those were low flow toilets & they paid for themselves in about 2 years because of lower water bills (waters high around here).
Lastly & I have no numbers on this one. We found that GoodRX did lower our cost a LOT on a fair amount of meds.
The above was right off the top of my head but the topic is open. Anything you have done that helped you that other might not have thought of, post it here. Wouldn't it be nice to save others some money, pain or even trouble?
