Maybe stepping back slowly could help. Like if there are three AI tools that you usually rely on, this week only use two of them, then the next week only use one, etc.
My spouse and I were broke grad students with a baby on the way. We needed a car. Someone in our tiny town was selling a 1992 Accord for $1000 (this was in the early 2010s). We bought it and put in another $1000 to get it to run.
The only problem? It was a stick shift. I didn't know how to drive standard; at the time, my spouse didn't drive at all. I tried to learn, but I was so nauseated from my pregnancy that I nearly puked every time the car lurched... which was often. I never did get the hang of it. Eventually we bought a newer automatic car and traded the Accord in for a whopping $250.
These days we could weather a $2000 mistake without too many problems, but back then... yeah, that one hurt.
You'd be losing a lot of extra product to the trimming that way -- or you'd maybe have to use individual molds for each bar. With a rectangular shape, you can pour the soap into slabs and then cut everything exactly to size with very little wastage.
Our stove has those and I've never noticed this; everything takes about the same time to cook as on our last stove, which had the older-style elements. I wonder if it might be a problem with your particular model or brand?
I had a second-hand bread machine that served me very well for several years, until one day when it started vibrating like crazy and threw itself off the counter mid-knead. The whole lid smashed into about seven pieces and the dough went all over the floor. We still refer to it as "the time the bread maker committed suicide."
Anyway, that's how I ended up making all our bread by hand for the next four years or so.
I think you'd probably be better off talking to a local financial advisor and/or real estate agent than just asking lemmy over and over.