1076 – Basic skills you need: Tom talks Household Skills

SUMMARY BY CHATGPT

Tom Antion explains how learning basic household and vehicle repair skills can save entrepreneurs—especially those working from home—enormous amounts of money and time. Drawing from his blue-collar upbringing and decades of business experience, Tom emphasizes that money saved on avoidable repair costs can be redirected into building a business, paying off debt, or increasing financial security.
He shares a real-life example of a neighbor who paid $2,000 for an emergency plumbing repair that Tom could have fixed himself for about $10 with basic PVC supplies. Similar stories from his past—including major plumbing failures and vehicle maintenance—illustrate how simple skills prevented massive expenses over the years.
Tom stresses that tradespeople aren’t “ripping people off”—emergency service is legitimately expensive—but lacking basic skills leaves people with no choice. While he doesn’t suggest becoming a professional tradesperson, he strongly encourages developing entry-level DIY competence.
The episode outlines essential tools everyone should own, including:
• Basic hand tools (hammer, screwdrivers, pliers, adjustable wrenches)
• A cordless drill with bits
• Electrical safety tools (outlet tester, non-contact voltage tester, multimeter)
• Car maintenance tools (socket set, ratchet, wrenches)
He also explains practical uses for these tools, such as:
• Diagnosing dead car batteries
• Replacing a car battery cheaply
• Recharging automotive A/C systems
• Identifying electrical issues safely
• Avoiding unnecessary service calls
Tom repeatedly cautions listeners not to attempt dangerous electrical work if they’re uncomfortable, but says understanding how systems work helps even when hiring professionals.
Key takeaway:
Learning a small set of household and car maintenance skills—supported by YouTube tutorials—can save thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars over a lifetime, reduce downtime, and give business owners greater control over their finances.

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Episode 1076 – Household Skills
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.
[00:00:24] Hey everybody! It's Tom here with episode 1076 of Screw the Commute podcast. Today we're going to talk about household skills that can save you an enormous amount of money if you work out of your home or office. All right, let's see. Hope you missed episode 1075. That was ask Tom a question. You can always send questions to me offline at Tom@screwthecommute.com. I'll either answer them on air or answer you perfectly or personally. Perfectly personally. How about that? Let's see. Pick up a copy of my automation book at screwthecommute.com/automatefree. Free version 3.0 is the latest. And check out my mentor program at GreatInternetMarketingtraining.com and my school IMTCVA.org. Certified to operate by the State Council on Higher Education in Virginia. But you don't have to be in Virginia because it's quality distance learning.
[00:01:20] Okay. Let's talk about this a little bit. You know, I've done very well over the years, long before the internet. I was doing doing well in business, but I grew up in a blue collar household where my dad was an entrepreneur, but he was also a certified and union electrician. So I learned a lot about working with tools. So he would fix his cars. He would build cabins and rent them out on property with carpentry and electricity and plumbing and all those kinds of things and roofing. And so I learned I grew up around that.
[00:02:08] And I understand a lot of people did not grow up around that. But I want to tell you the value of increasing some of those kinds of skills. If you want to get to where you're going financially way faster than you may be going now. So that's the the gist of this episode is to show you how getting some skills on things that happen to you around your house and your car and so forth can save you enormous. I'm talking enormous amounts of money. And I've got reminded of this just yesterday. It's a real cold snap here in Virginia Beach. We're in the like 20s. And my neighbor next door who I help out all the time on stuff. I mean, he was an old newspaper editor, so he's not totally skilled with tools and things, but he called me and said, hey, the underneath my house is flooded. And it's like I said, it's ice. Half of it's ice because it's freezing outside. And. And it wasn't totally ice. It was kind of slushy ice because it was the water. Whatever the leak was, was getting heat from the house to keep it from fully freezing. But I ran over and I shut the water off at the street for him because he didn't really know where the the interior shut off valve was. So I found the shut off valve under the house for him and shut the water off to the house first, but we could still hear the leak.
[00:03:53] And so I went out to the street, and I know how to turn off the water at the street. And when I went down there, the the water meter was going like like you see on a cartoon or like a, a, you know, when they speed up something, it was just going around like crazy. So water was leaking under the house before it got to the shut off valve that went into the house. And I said, wow, you know, I brought him over jugs of water. We had like those five gallon things and a pump on top to so he could get some water to feed the, you know, to for the dogs and all that, all this stuff. And, and I said, you know, this is going to be quite a mess underneath there. It's probably just a pipe that burst. But if it's underground, it's going to be quite an ordeal. And I didn't have time or, you know, the scuba diving outfit to fix it right then for him. If it was my house, I would have had to do it. But but I said, this is going to cost a lot of money on a Friday night to get a plumbing company. Plumbing is not cheap, folks to come out and fix this.
[00:05:14] And as it turned out, a rat or something ate through a PVC pipe that wasn't even underground, which was good. It was exposed, which I could have easily fixed for $10 just to get some PVC pipe, cut the pipe, replace the place that got eaten through, glue it back together and been done for ten bucks. Cost him $2,000 and he tipped the guy 50 bucks for coming out on a Friday night. $2,000 instead of $10. All right. So. So if it was me, I'd have put on a wetsuit. I have a wetsuit. I would have gone and fixed it for ten bucks and I even kind of offered, I'll get in there and try to fix it for you. But he said, no, no, no, I don't want you to do that. And so, so, uh, 2000 bucks. So these skills and that's why they're, they're pushing heavily like that. Mike Rowe from Dirty Jobs is saying gets you know, those people were making hundreds of thousands of dollars with no just out of high school by plumbing and heating and air conditioning and car repair and things like that. So but I'm not telling you to go into those fields. I'd rather you go into the internet marketing field. However, if you're going to work out of your home or small office, usually it's going to be your home. You can burn up enormous amounts of money that could be used for your business, or to build up your your reserves or to pay off your bills, uh, rather than 2000 bucks to a plumbing company.
[00:06:59] And this is not unheard of. In other words, he didn't get ripped off. This is what it costs nowadays for those people to come out, especially on emergency basis. But that $10 piece of pipe could have been fixed easily. But if you're going to if you're if you can't do these things, then you're basically screwed. You're and and I can't do everything, but I can do a lot of things that have saved me tens of thousands. I mean, oh, and as long as I've been in business, hundreds of thousands. I can think of one thing back in the 70s on an apartment building that the kids I was renting to kids and they went home for, for, uh, um, winter break. And the neighbor called me and said, you know, Tom, there's water running out the front door of your house. You know, I got there. It was like a ski slope, but it was all ice. The kids had turned the heat off, and all these three quarter inch copper pipes broke. And the whole three story house. The radiant heat. And I'm thinking I'm screwed. I'm totally so screwed. So my dad came down and showed me how to repair each split in the pipe with preparing it, pounding it back together and soldering it.
[00:08:19] And the whole I didn't have to three quarter inch copper pipe. Go to Home Depot and ask him for a ten foot piece of three quarter inch copper. See how much it costs. All right. So so I was been so screwed even in the 70s to buy, you know, I don't know, 500ft of pipe, you know, three stories. So. So this is the kind of thing I'm talking about that would have cost me in the 70s, $2,000 at least, at least to have somebody else do it. And I did it myself for just some cans of propane and some solder because my dad showed me how to do it. And let's take my cars, my cars frequently. If your air conditioning needs charged up, this is not rocket science, folks with, you know, watching a couple YouTube videos and getting some of the stuff at the auto parts store, you know, something that would have cost you 100 to 200 bucks at at any kind of garage would cost you $30, maybe for one can of stuff and the, the little hose and and trigger to put it in. All right. So now there's times of course, when you can't fix things yourself, but when you can, you can save a fortune. And not only the fortune in money, but the time that you take to, to wait for, for people to fix stuff for you.
[00:09:49] And I'm going to give you a list of basic tools to keep on hand for, for basically your home, for your car. Uh, and, um, and now one, one thing that comes up is electrical stuff. So that's if you're not comfortable with this, do not do this right. I'm okay. If you gotta hang a picture and it falls off the wall. But I'm not okay if you do something stupid and electrocute yourself, right? That that ruins my subscribers count. You know, if you if you electrocute yourself, people find out about it. Yeah. They listen to screw the commute podcast and electrocute themselves. That's terrible for my reputation, right? But. But there are simple things that you should understand about your electrical stuff so that you can troubleshoot it yourself and at least pinpoint some things to make. If you do have to get an electrician, you can narrow things down instead of them having to start from scratch. All right. So so my whole point here is the more you you can do yourself, it's really a great feeling to be able to do it. Plus can you imagine 2000. Just think of wherever you're at in financial life right now. If somebody had to come over for half an hour and you gave them 2000 bucks, would you be all happy about that? I wouldn't.
[00:11:24] So I'm going to go through some basic tools to have on hand. And and then also, like I said, the things that come up, you can usually find a YouTube video or hundreds of YouTube videos telling you what to do about it. Okay. So these are basic tools a hammer, a screwdriver, both Phillips and Straight. And usually you can buy these little combination ones for 2 or $3 that have two sizes of Phillips and two sizes of straights and one thing at Harbor. Harbor freight is a great place to do this, to buy these tools. And then you should have a super small set of screwdrivers. I still to this day I buy stuff and you have to unscrew this tiny little screw. I mean, it's it's probably a 16th of an inch or less in size that you need a tiny, tiny, tiny screwdriver sets. And there are a couple dollars. I mean, if you really do a lot of work, you could pay 20 or 30 for a good German set. But for basic stuff to have around the little $3 set is good enough. Super small set of screwdrivers, needle nose pliers. They're very handy to have have around. That's a pair of pliers that comes down to a long snoot, almost like an anteater. Very handy. And you could get regular pliers too, if you want. If you.
[00:12:55] You know, if you have plenty of cash on hand, then a pair of channel locks. Channel locks are basically an adjustable wrench that'll that'll handle a whole bunch of different sizes with one wrench. Channel locks. Crescent wrench is another adjustable wrench. It's a different in. It's, uh, Crescent is, I believe, is a trade name. Everybody knows what a crescent wrench is. If you go to the store and get a large and a small one, it's another adjustable wrench for for nuts and bolts and things. And then some type of portable drill with drill bits, in other words. So you can drill holes in things or you can put screwdriver bits in them if you have loads of screws, if you're putting together something, some piece of furniture or something that has screws, or if you're repairing your your back deck or something you want to put a screw in, you don't want to have to do it by hand. Portable drill. It's usually going to be battery operated. Nowadays the batteries cost as much as the drill sometimes. Okay, now electrical stuff. Even though, like I said, if you're not comfortable with this stuff, don't do it. But you still should have some of these little things around and, uh, a, an understanding of what goes on. So one thing would be a tester that you can go to any Home Depot or Lowe's, and you plug it in to a receptacle and it'll tell you, okay, is there power there? And if so, is the thing wired correctly? If you have something that's you plug it in and it won't work.
[00:14:36] It might be that that receptacle is bad. Uh, you also should know about breakers. Every home has what they call a breaker box. It has a main thing that turns off all the electricity, and then they have different circuits going to different places in the house, or you have different higher voltage ones for your dryer and your ovens and things like that. So you should try to keep that labeled properly so you know what breaker goes to what, but you don't always test or trust it. You know, if you turn off a breaker it says, okay, that's a hot water heater. You still want to check the hot water heater to make sure that it's actually off. If it's an electric hot water heater, because you don't want to mess around with that and, you know, get shocked. So there's another thing you can buy at Home Depot for about 20 bucks, and you can hold it near a anything with electricity, and it'll beep if there's electricity there and light up red. That way you can say, uh oh, I thought this was supposed to be off and it's still on. You never want to work on anything or fool with anything if it's hot.
[00:15:53] You know, if you don't know what you're doing. So you should know about breaker boxes. You should know about GFCI. These are called ground fault circuit interrupter. These are the ones that have the little button that says test on it. Those are supposed to be installed anywhere near water like like your kitchen or your bathrooms. And they're super sensitive so that when you're around water, if something goes wrong, it shuts everything off like faster than lightning so that you don't get shocked. And then this is kind of funny. Electrical tape. The black electrical tape. They come in different colors too. But. But I grew up on black electrical tape because my dad was a foreman on electrical jobs, and he always had electrical tape. We used it for everything to fix, to put the handle on our bats for baseball and to fix our gloves and anything that was broken. We fixed it with electrical tape and then a cheap multimeter. These are even the new, newer one, the cheap ones. You don't have to know how many volts you know. It automatically senses what it's checking. It's another way to check to see if there's electricity and if there's the right amount of electricity. And and now the next section is for stuff to have for your car available. And the multimeter is also very useful for your car.
[00:17:26] So let's say your car won't start, won't even turn over or you hear some clicks. Well that's probably the battery, most likely the battery. So you get your multimeter out, you put it on a 20 volt scale or so forth, and you hold 1 to 1 part of the battery, one to the other. And if it reads like 11V, your battery is dead, right? It has to be 12 points. Like three or 4 or 5 to be a good battery. And if the car is running, it should be around 14V. So if you see 11.5V, you've got a dead battery. So it's either for some reason somebody left the lights on or it's just shot. And. And here's another some things for your batteries. You should know if you go like for instance, I went to Pep Boys and they wanted $380 to swap out a battery for me. And that's ridiculous. So I went to Walmart, bought the same battery and put it in myself. And I mean, it was 100 and $150. Okay. So the thing is with with batteries, if you buy a new battery. They always have a sticker on them that shows when they were manufactured. So today is uh, is the 31st of January when I'm recording this in 2026. And so if it says, uh, 225, that battery is already a year old before I bought it, and batteries have a life to them.
[00:19:13] These are the kind of things, if you know these things, you don't get ripped off and you can save a lot of money. So I just saved 200 bucks there on the battery, put it in myself. But when I went to Walmart to choose which battery I was going to buy, they had 3 or 4 of them there that would fit, but I picked the one that was like two months old instead of a year old. Okay, so those are the kinds of things that can just save you a fortune. But anyway, for your car, You should have a ratchet. And I would. And they the three different sizes they usually come in are quarter inch, 3/8 and half inch. Half inch is big. Quarter inch is really small. So if you're just going to buy one set, get a 3/8 inch set and then you buy a set of sockets for it, different sizes. But you buy one set that's metric and one set that's SA, it's called. So you need both on. A lot of modern cars have the metric sizes and some are the the American English sizes. And you should have a couple extensions to make to go in deeper to get the stuff that you can't reach. And then you want some wrenches. So you can go to Harbor Freight. And for dirt cheap, maybe ten bucks, you can get a set of metric open and box end Wrenches and get one metric and one C to start with.
[00:20:48] Okay, if you had all that stuff, you could save yourself thousands and thousands of dollars next year with just little stuff that messes up. Now with the electric, with the air conditioning. Yeah, you need to buy the right air conditioning stuff. You need to watch some videos for your make and model, and you can usually throw in some. We call it Freon, but it's actually a refrigerant that kind of leaks out over the winter a little bit. It's going to save you hundreds and hundreds of dollars. I've been doing it on my pickup truck and my suburban for probably, let's see, 20 years on my pickup truck and ten years on my suburban, and each time would have been 200 bucks. Right? So maybe once a year I fool with it. So it's just thousands and thousands of dollars. And of course, learning more about your car and your engine and what to watch for and make. You know, I used to change my oil myself, but it just I got enough money. I just don't feel like jacking the car up and getting under there anymore. But I still do it on all my, my quads and my my rokon, uh, the motorcycle, you know, two motorcycles and the the, you know, the antique off road vehicles I have, I do all of that stuff, you know, with wiring and but it was just stuff I developed over the years.
[00:22:16] You don't have to go that crazy to still save yourself a lot of money. And it's all as I said, this whole episode so came about because of my my neighbor's $2,000. I oh, I was just dying for him. Just dying for him. 2000 bucks. And I better knock on wood that my my house doesn't freeze up and I have to go fix mine mind myself. So anyway, that's a little bit different than my typical, you know, how to make money online stuff. But or when you're in business, these are the things like I said, there's hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars during the time I've been in business that are in my bank account because I had these skills, and you can get them a little bit at a time and get yourself a basic toolkit going on. And when something comes up, watch videos about it. If it's too crazy, okay, go ahead and hire somebody. But a lot of times it is just not that hard to fix regular stuff, especially faucet washers and simple things that a plumber would cost you 80 to 100 bucks just to come out and fix. There you go. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it. We'll catch you on the next episode. See you later.