My last landlord raised rent $200 after my first year, so I'd rather cap my housing cost at 30% of income than gamble on another spike. Doesn't that protect you more when the market goes crazy?

Is it really that deep though? You watched a couple YouTube videos and then called your dad, so what. Half the stuff on YouTube is wrong anyway, at least your old man has probably fixed a toilet before.

Man, I feel your pain on that one. I had almost the exact same thing happen with a 14-inch bandsaw blade I bought from a big online seller last year. The weld was so rough it left a groove in every piece of wood I tried to cut, and I spent a whole afternoon messing with tension and tracking before I figured it out. It's frustrating because you expect a new blade to be ready to go out of the box, not something you have to fix right away. I ended up taking a fine diamond file to it and it worked fine after that, but it still bugs me that they let it out the door like that. You're not alone in this, it's a real drag when something basic like that eats up your whole day.

My 2015 laptop takes 15 minutes just to open Chrome so I get a full coffee break in before the page even thinks about loading. Meanwhile my buddy's new one loads so fast the ad plays before he can even click skip. Guess I'm stuck in the slow lane with plenty of time to think about what I'm missing.

Rent a tiller and you're basically hitting reset on years of soil work. Skip the upfront shortcuts, they always come back to bite you.