I ' m paid reasonably for someone at my level in the trade . I work for a Premium brand so that helps keep my pay up i suppose . Fortunately here in Australia , the government had a program that would give apprentices money for there tools , no strings attached . I received about $ 30003500 before the program was axed and replaced with a loan scheme because who doesn ' t love a $ 10000 debt when you ' re earning $ 7 . 80 an hour as a first year . So that made a big dent in what I needed to fork out for tools . Most of my tools are SP , Sidchrome , Kinchrome , Wurth and Bosch with a few random brands thrown in for measure . <| sep |> X marks the spot . <| sep |> What ' s interesting is that one of my fellow Cart Pushers said , There will be people that will probably be returning TVs the day after because they realized they need to eat this month . It is true because there were poor people loading these nice TVs in their car and then there were rich people loading the cheap TVs in their car .