You start off the day owing $\$ 5$ to a friend, After 3 hours af work at $x$ dollars per hour, you pay the debt to your friend and have $\$ 4$ remaining. Write an equation to model this situation.

Step 1 ：You start off the day owing $5 to a friend. After 3 hours of work at $x dollars per hour, you pay the debt to your friend and have $4 remaining.

Step 2 ：The situation can be modeled by an equation where the total amount of money you earn from working (which is the number of hours worked times the hourly wage) is equal to the amount of money you owed plus the amount of money you have left after paying off the debt.

Step 3 ：The equation that models this situation is \(3x = 9\).

Step 4 ：Solving the equation gives the hourly wage as \(\boxed{3}\) dollars per hour.