How much incidental (non-helpful) knowledge must you learn in order to know what are the things that are worthwhile and what are not?
I bought my repair book speculatively. Subsequently, as repairs became necessary I googled to get a feel for what the normal costs for that repair were and the cost for the parts. Then I looked at my book to see how much sense the instructions made to me and decided from there whether I thought I could get the job done for less time than the price difference would be worth, roughly speaking. I didn't learn anything new to make the estimate and my only previous automotive repair experience was having changed my oil once or twice with my Dad as a teen. I did...
What can I purchase with $100 that will be the best thing I can buy to make my life better?
I've decided to budget some regular money to improving my life each month. I'd like to start with low hanging fruit for obvious reasons - but when I sat down to think of improvements, I found myself thinking of the same old things I'd already been planning to do anyway... and I'd like out of that rut.
Constraints/more info:
Background:
This is a question I recently posed to my local Less Wrong group and we came up with a few good ideas, so I thought I'd share the discussion with the wider community and see what we can come up with. I'll add the list we came up with later on in the comments...
It'd be great to have a repository of low-hanging fruit for things that can be solved with (relatively affordable) amounts of money. I'd personally like to go through the list - look at candidates that sound like they'd be really useful to me and then make a prioritised list of what to work on first.