Dr. wants me to learn domestic skills and nothing else until I am ready. What are some skills do you suggest I learn?

Cooking some simple dishes like scrambled eggs, pasta (boil water, add spaghetti, cook, drain add a jar of marinara sauce), a basic soup recipe and salad with oil, vinegar and mustard salad dressing.

Congratulations! Learning domestic skills is an important task for everybody.

I suggest you learn to do your laundry. You can either go to a laundromat or get someone to teach you to run the machines at the house where you live. Have a friend teach you how to set the dials and buttons. Learn what everything is for on both the washer and the dryer. Learn how much detergent to add. Take notes so you can study them later and remember what to do.

How to do laundry. Cold water wash for bright colors hot with bleach for whites and never use bleach on colors or you will have a tye dyed wardrobe.

Learn some basic auto mechanic skills. You can save a bundle changing your own brakes, or oil, or tune up…

Laundry is a very good suggestion. Also, budgeting for food and making nutritionally balanced meals. I use ‘Flylady’ to help me with my housework because I get overwhelmed, especially now that I’m sick and my flare-ups put me in bed for a day after I over-do it. I vacuumed and washed some of the floors in the house and I could barely do the grocery shopping afterwards. http://www.flylady.net/ can help you plan and budget time and energy to housecleaning.

@gailcalled has made a good suggestion. Cooking is important, and I suggest you start with very simple food. Learn how to make toast with butter and scrambled eggs. Pasta with a jar of sauce is also good to learn how to make. Cooking a frozen pizza in the oven is another thing to learn.

Canned soups are easy. You open the can, pour it in a pan, and heat it on the stove or in the microwave in a microwave-safe bowl.

I eat a lot of sandwiches. I use lunch meat and cheese and lettuce with mayonnaise.

These days, salad comes ready-to-eat in a bag. You can buy salad dressing or use vinegar and oil.

This is a great question. Thank you for asking.

I suggest keeping a diary of what you do. That way you can set goals, like learning to cook a favorite meal or bake some yummy goody, balance your schedule and see how far you’ve come.

Thanks @cazzie I am going to check that out.

Learning some basic home repairs is useful too. How to change the fuse on a plug, how to stop a dripping tap/faucet, how to sew a button onto an item of clothing. All good money-saving skills.

Cleaning. Making a little chart for one task a day that takes 20 minutes or less. Sweeping, vacuuming, wiping surfaces, windows, toilet, etc. If you do one thing a day at the same time of day your house will feel much better!

@Dan_Lyons If memory servers, OP doesn’t even have a license.

You want to run ahead already?

One skill you need before anything else is to walk before you run. Yes, it’s great to have goals and dreams, but what will you save if you spend so much chasing those dreams that you don’t have anything left to pay rent or feed yourself? Setting realistic goals is an important skill, as is learning to live within your means. Buying the food you like may bring joy, but being evicted because you spent your rent money on frozen pizzas will bring a larger dose of misery. Of course, if you shop wisely for ingredients and learn to cook, you can live within your means and still have pizza. Part of being a self-sufficient adult is learning to put your needs ahead of your desires.

Once you learn to prioritize, the rest is just details, and also a means to an end. For instance, learning to cook will save you enough money to allow you to put a little aside into savings, and putting video games away for a couple hours to go do laundry will pay off by having people not wrinkle their noses and run away whenever you’re upwind of them. Both are little parts of the greater skill of setting priorities and surviving long enough to reach your goals, even if the act of survival makes those goals take longer to achieve than you’d like.

Learn patience!

Well…I am an epic fail at car stuff, I just take my car in to have all the fluids checked and couldn’t change a tire if my life depended on it. hey…left handed, right brained blonde, this is why I am loyal to my mechanic. lol

If you are still in high school take a home economics class and if you can’t take one then at least learn how to sew. Learn how to balance a check book. Learn about saving and investing money which means disciplined spending and that requires a budget you need to list out in great detail and stick to it. I would suggest getting 2 savings accounts and a checking account and learn to balance that check book. Make one account your “rent” account and pay a set amount of rent and utilities to this account at the end of each month. The second account should be your savings account that will be money you do not touch and is only there for emergencies. Doing this will be great practice for you to learn within your means and also force you to find ways to be resourceful and creative with the money you do earn.

Here is a very important part of being an adult and that is establishing credit. Once you have your budget nailed down use credit cards instead of checks or cash for all your purchases and pay off the credit balance in full every month. If the stores you shop at have their own credit cards apply for them and use them when you shop there and again pay off the balances.

Learn the finer art of frugal shopping. My 17 yr. old son is expert at this and get’s a lot of his stuff at Good Will and is an avid Walmart shopper too. Also join Freecycle People there daily give away stuff and you can find almost anything you can imagine or want for free.

^^ @talljasperman is 36 years old; he lists over 4200 topics of interest in his profile.

I love freecycle!

^^ Me,too. i get such a kick out of what people seem to be willing to pick up and reuse.It is an almost daily source of amusement.

I love my baby grand piano I got off freecycle though it cost me $250 to move it. It plays beautifully!

Based on another answer you gave, you might need to make sure your personal grooming skills are appropriate.

I think @Cruiser understates the importance of shopping skills. While my folks may be able to take 2-week European vacations every year, my mother still buys her clothes at thrift shops.

Some of my computers weren’t even shopped for; you’d be amazed what you can find in the right dumpster! Of course, with Freecycle and Craigslist around, it’s a bit easier to find good stuff without overpaying (or, sometimes, without paying at all). There’s no way I would pay $130 for a $100 video card, especially not if I can get it for $80 or less, but without good shopping skills, you probably will pay at least 20% more than you need to for no good reason at all. Which is the better deal on Pepsi; 3 12-packs for $10, 4 12-packs for $12, $5 for a 20-pack, or $9.79 for a 36-pack? That is the sort of stuff you need to know if you want to keep as much of your money as possible.

Nutrition and portion control.

@jerv‘s first comment was totally on the mark.

Well, when I look back at the first time I lived away from home, I had to learn how to vacuum, dust, make beds, do dishes, cook simple but healthy meals, do laundry, pay bills and budget money. The “budget money” was the hard one, because it included balancing a checkbook. With on-line banking, you don’t really have to do that anymore.

You could learn how to take care of something. Get a plant – tomatoes, for instance – and watch it thrive.