I guess I may have just discovered this a while before you do....
The guy who did a required inspection on the home I bought comes to mind. He was basically a handy man who studied and passed a state test. I think he charged about $300 for about 30 minutes of real work.... he stood around and talked for awhile too.
I find myself 'rediscovering' things I knew long ago all the time...with more than a half-century under your belt, knowledge starts to cycle, particularly in areas you only visit infrequently.
The story goes like this: a factory hired a subject matter expert to figure out where the problem was in their assembly line. All their in-house engineers had been working on the problem for months, couldn't isolate the problem. So they flew this expert in just for the one job. He walked around the factory for an hour, touching nothing, just looking around. At the end of the hour, he walked back across the assembly floor to one particular machine, took a piece of chalk out of his pocket, and wrote an 'X' on one electrical component. "Replace that part," was all he said.
The factory team did. Perfect fix!
Two weeks later, his bill came in the mail: $10,000.
The factory owner said to his accounting staff, "$10,000 for an hour's work? It's outrageous! I won't pay it! I know...ask him to itemize the bill. That will solve this problem for us." So the chief accountant wrote a letter back to the expert.
Two weeks later, the expert's response came. It said:
ITEMIZED BREAKDOWN OF SERVICE CHARGE:
Piece of chalk: $1.
Knowing where to put the X: $9,999.
The factory paid the bill.
Point is, knowledge is important. If you hired a home inspector who didn't know his business, now you know not to go with him again. But the inspectors we used (17 moves in a 26 year career) generally knew construction standards and code extremely well, and frequently found issues that needed fixing before we bought. Was usually $250-$300 well spent, we thought.
