Ep 005 - How to Manage Your Home Documents

Welcome to Be a Smarter Homeowner Podcast, where you'll discover strategies to save money, save time, and be better organized in managing your largest financial asset and biggest expense, your home. Your hosts, John Bodrozic and Beth Dodson, who are co-founders of HomeZada, have been supporting homeowners for over 20 years. They are here to share with you their tips and suggestions, as well as interviews with industry experts, with the goal of helping you become a smarter homeowner. Now, here's your hosts, Jon and Beth.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of Be a Smarter Homeowner Podcast. I'm here with my co-host, Beth Dodson, and today we've got an exciting episode talking about what we refer to as home documents. What does that actually mean? If you think about your home, there are so many different types of documents that we either should have or do have stored and scattered about our house. And those documents are very important to not only managing and maintaining the house, but also, you know, personal documents as you sort of live life and need to have access to those things. And we live in a society where the bulk of our documents about our home and our personal lives may be still in paper format. But clearly, we're going through, you know, as a world, the digital transformation of creating digital versions of those. So, people oftentimes struggle between, should I keep paper? Should I keep digital? Or should I have a little bit of both? And getting into more of the specifics around all the different documents about if you're going to convert to a digital strategy, what should, what should you be thinking about as it relates to creating that? What's the value of having digital documents? We're going to explore all those different avenues in this episode. And so, Beth, why don't you kick us off and why don't you just sort of talk high level? When you think about your home, what are all the different types or categories of documents that most people have about their home?

So homes are very complex. So we have a lot of different categories. The first category I can relate to, as many homeowners can, is you've got this transaction of buying a home. So there's a lot of real estate documents that you need as it pertains to the home.

And when you initially bought it?

Yes.

Okay.

Or sold it.

Okay.

So either or.

Yeah.

So one of— some of those things may be mortgages, mortgage information. It's all your disclosures that you have when you buy a home, your truth in lending, your contract. What was the sale price? Your appraisals. It could be an inspection, a variety of other things depending on the city, county, and state where you live. But a lot of those standardized documents are usually in a big pack, title documents too, and you usually have them somewhere in your house or you sign them, or sometimes now we are moving to more digital aspects. The other category I would say is the actual home itself. The structure of the home has equipment and appliances that may have some sort of manual. On how to use it, what the manufacturer recommends, etc. You may have warranties for these items. That's one area. The other area, which is kind of tied to it, is the contents in your home may have receipts. They may have certificates of authenticity because maybe there's some special value that you've, you've done with this, or an appraisal on them as well. Maybe you've got antique furniture that that you've appraised. Or it could be manuals because you've got electronics. It could be, um, what's the word I'm looking for? It could be owner's manuals as well because a lot of these items need owner's manuals. And I think I just repeated myself, but that's a whole nother story. Um, but there's other items that— there's other documents that these items have. They also have warranties. The other thing I also see when it comes to documents, we've got the actual products inside your house, we've got the equipment inside your house, we've got real estate documents, we've also got personal documents. So a lot of people sometimes consider the personal aspects of your life, you're part of, I guess it resides in the home area because there's like this kind of in between. Where does it reside? It's not work. It's not—

So when you say personal documents, can you give us some examples? I mean, when I, when I hear it, I think about, right, people tell me, oh, you should have a paper copy of your passport when you travel in case you lose your passport.

Copies of driver's license.

Copies of driver's license. What other kind of personal documents?

Wills, trusts, power of attorneys, medical directives. Once that does happen, I can also see Maybe you've got personal documents. Like, I can see like so many different personal documents because I actually track all of my personal documents in the cloud, which is kind of crazy, but I love it. So I just see a lot of personal things that you may have a family member's will.

Right.

Because you may be the executor long term and they may have given it to you now that you want to understand it. So I think personal documents can vary depending on the individual, but I think they kind of get considered home-related because where else kind of do they reside? Right.

And a few categories that I thought of also on the home-related documents, 2 categories. One is home remodeling.

Oh yeah.

Right? There's what I call the larger remodel, right? expansion of my house, or I'm going to get a new roof, or I'm going to get a new kitchen. Usually those bigger projects require a permit from your local county. They're going to be involved projects where you're probably hiring a contractor. Most people don't have the trade skills to do that DIY. So you've got the initial bids, right, that you may get from multiple contractors. You've got the invoices of how you're paying the contractor. You may have a home equity loan to help pay for that, right? And maybe some of that is coming out of your pocket and some of that's coming out of You know, the loan. And so anybody who goes through a major remodel process is going to have a whole bunch of documents around that. Some of them may even have plans, right?

Absolutely.

You may have had to hire an architect engineer to basically lay out how your new kitchen, you know, is going to look and work. And a lot of those remodels end up with new products that you buy, new appliances, new cabinets. And not only is it the— you love the owner's manuals today, don't you?

Sometimes.

Yes, they are going to have owner's manuals, but oftentimes they're also going to have what's called product warranties.

Yes.

Right. You buy a new refrigerator, maybe there's a 1-year warranty or a 2-year warranty. And so there's a warranty document that may be separate from the initial owner's manual. And there may also be what's known as product registration cards. Right. A lot of those manufacturers, in order to successfully use the product warranty, they want you to register that you actually purchased their product on such and such a date. So that becomes another document. Another category of documents when I think about the home is what I call the ongoing financial documents about primarily the total cost to own the home.

Yes.

And that gets into, again, energy. It's all your monthly bills, right? And some people are like, okay, my monthly bills have come in. And I'm just gonna pay 'em and throw 'em away. Other people wanna keep track of those bills, right? And they save them. And some people wanna convert them to digital. Some people wanna leave them paper. It's entirely up to, you know, it's essentially a consumer choice.

Yes.

But it generates a tremendous amount of paper, all of the monthly bills that come in. And I know from my own personal experience, I'd say that half of the bills that come in for our house come in still via paper. Some of them come in via PDF in an email system, but it's, again, it's a mishmash of all these different sort of documents comes together. So we've kind of given our audience a kind of a holistic—

There's a lot of documents.

A holistic view of all these different documents about primarily your home. And then there's the, how do you think about all your personal documents, right? How about what I call developing a strategy over how to store them. And let's say you're storing them in paper, and I know that you are a very organized person. How did you create your storage system when you were storing them via paper?

Oh, that was, that was, um, I generally had them in one location and I had them via category. So I stored them, you know, real estate documents here, Manuals here, you know, so on and so forth. I just had them in an organized central location. But here's what then happened. Either some items couldn't fit in that location. So we had, because we built our house, we had a lot of plans both inside and outside for landscaping and the construction of it that I had to store that in a separate location.

Mm-hmm.

Because it just wouldn't fit in this file cabinet type item area. And then one of the things that also started happening is there was only so much space in that file cabinet. And so all of a sudden I had to—

You needed more file cabinets.

I did. And so I had to have more file cabinets. And then I had a box of, I think, owner's manuals or even in our case, Because let's say we built a house and we had a giant remodel project, if that's what you want to call it. We had all these different documents related to the finishes that we also had. I think that was in another box. And I ended up having, I believe, somewhere between 9, 7 and 9 locations for all this paperwork.

So you were organized, but you were also unorganized, a little bit of both.

I was organized, but I refused to dedicate one room to just file cabinets. That's what I want my house to be useful, not for file cabinets.

Oh, okay. So what about the— we have a huge audience of different generations of homeowners, right? From millennials to Xers to boomers to seniors, right? And so for those people who are considering, you know, going digital and haven't done it yet, Or maybe they're in the process of half digital, half paper. What do you— what is the pros and cons over people who are going to commit to going digital and what should they do with their paper if they do decide to go digital and create digital copies of all their documents?

So the first thing I see is there's pros to going digital in the fact that you can centrally store all this information that's really valuable. As I just indicated, I had paper in 7 to 9 different areas in my house. And if I recall correctly, you didn't even know where anything was. Like, you would have to ask me. You would have to ask me where things are. And so—

I like the search function.

There's another pro.

Exactly. Because if I don't, if I have to go through paper, there's no search function. I'm like, where? I can't, I don't understand your filing system and your categorization system. That's why Search in a search box is so much easier.

Yeah. So he just loved— so there's a pro. So it's in central, one central location, and then you can search for it easily with technology. I think the other thing that is a pro is that you can store paper documents digitally in a variety of solutions very easily. And we are moving to a more digital world. That is happening. It's not for everybody. There are some people that still like paper. I'm one of these people. I still like to take notes on a notebook with a pen and paper because I just learn better that way. But when it comes to moving digitally, I think a lot of people are going there. I think some of the cons may be for those people who do have an organized system and they don't have a lot of documents. They may feel uncomfortable. It may be a stretch for them and they have to ease into it. One of the other pros I also see is many of these documents, because of the type of paper that they're on, their ink disappears. So—

Those receipts that you get where you stick them on your desk in the sun and whatnot, or even 30 days later you can't even read them anymore.

They just don't even have the ink anymore. It's just the very nature of the process of creating these receipts. And I know a lot of people don't even have receipts anymore. They don't even print them. They'll email them to you. So that's another pro, is if someone's going to email you the receipt then, or text it, you have that document that you can place somewhere else in a centralized system. So I think that's also very valuable. As it relates to where people may want to get started on this is Once again, we're firm believers of taking a step at a time. If you want to swallow the whole elephant at once, it may be very stressful. So making sure you take a look at what's important to you and what type of documents are. So real estate documents, the big ones, the title, the truth in lending, some of the other signature documents are important, but other documents in that package may not be as important to you because they're standard documents. that you know you signed, but they may or may not be important to you. But real estate documents are easy to scan and put into something. Receipts, it's easy to take a photograph of it and then just eliminate it. It just takes up storage.

Yeah, I think it goes back to, you know, our audience is so diverse when it comes to different ages of homeowners, right? The millennials, Xers, boomers, seniors, right? Some are digital natives already. Some are half paper, half digital, and maybe some are currently all paper but considering going digital.

Yes.

Right? And it goes back to the— I know that when I've talked to homeowners who are in that age bracket of, I've got all this paper, I'm not really very organized, I want to go digital, there's this fear of, if I go digital, right? There's that emotional fear of like, I really like the paper because if I go digital, then I trust it.

It's gonna be there.

I always tell people, if you go digital, there's a lot of value, but it doesn't mean you have to eliminate and basically throw away all your paper. You know what I mean? There are people who do both, right? They're like committed to the whole digital process of creating all their digital documents, but they still want that peace of mind of that file cabinet in their house somewhere stored with all the paper versions of those documents, right? And so you can get the benefit of both worlds from that emotional security of having that paper somewhere, but then maybe the other benefits that we kind of talked about and we'll talk about later in the episode about having them all digital. So, I want to segue into maybe drilling down into the specifics of somebody who's like, okay, I want to go digital with all these documents. Or maybe somebody who's kind of partially digital today, partially in paper, but they really haven't thought about sort of what's the strategy about going digital.

That could be a disorganized person right there.

With a combination of the two because they haven't committed to either one or the other kind of mentality.

And it's kind of challenging, it's kind of a mixed bag, right?

So I know you have a hardware device called the scanner, right? So people could buy a scanner and that they basically, they're taking the hardware approach of I'm going to take all my paper documents and scan them.

Mm-hmm.

Um, maybe tell us a little bit about your experiences, you know, when you got your scanner and how that scanning process worked for you and Just add some color commentary to that.

Yeah, so there were some documents that I was able to scan because my scanner is a small format scanner, and some printers actually now have scanning capabilities in them if you have a printer at home. But one of the things that I would do is prioritize which documents were important to me, and a good example is my real estate documents. Those are just important to me, so I scan those in. And I put them in my own system to track and to understand. And then, yes, I shredded all of them and got rid of them.

So you were the one who got rid of the paper because you were confident in the digital?

I did. But there were other documents that I also have. We talked about those plans and those construction and landscaping plans. They were large format documents. And when I say large format, I mean large. They're just large in size.

Yeah, physical construction plans.

Correct. And those do not fit through a traditional scanner. And if you were to take a photograph of it, it would be very difficult. So for me, I took in the plans that were important to me. And I had them professionally scanned at an organization to make sure that they had the large format scanner. And it was a low cost to do that. And I also Put those in my recycling bin. I don't have those anymore either. I'm that girl that just went all in. But when it comes to other types of documents, I can simply take a photograph. And a good example of some of those documents is construction projects where you need to redo something, repair something. And so We had to do several different repairs in our backyard, whether it was concrete, whether it's tile, whether it's pool resurfacing, whatever. And my contractor that I was using, my service provider, they wrote the contract at the time in their office as we're going through this process. And I simply took a photograph of it.

Mm-hmm.

And I put it in my centralized location to track it. And the contractor at first thought I was kind of crazy. He's like, that's it. I go, no, I don't want this piece of paper. I have it now. We're good. And so it's a matter of you can scan it, you can send it out to be scanned. You can also take photographs. But here's the other thing to do as well. Even though you have a lot of documents about your home, in your home, possibly you still may not want them anymore. You may have old documents from a previous home you owned that you no longer own, and you just had it for a period of time. You can now remove those and get rid of those. You may have owner's manuals for specific types of appliances in your house. And a good example of that is a coffee maker. Like, I don't have an expensive coffee maker. I have a very little simple coffee maker.

Low budget coffee maker.

Low budget. Like, Just, I don't have a really expensive cappuccino maker like some people do. But I'm not going to keep an owner's manual for a simple little coffee maker. And speaking of owner's manuals, a lot of people think, well, should I scan all these? My personal opinion is no. There are sites online, for instance, manualsonline.com. And then also the manufacturer sites that generally have those owner's manuals. And then you can drag and drop the ones that are important to you in whatever system you're using. I, I'm a firm believer in that because you start realizing what's really important to you. A coffee maker's owner's manual may or may not be important to you. To me, it's not. But my stove, absolutely super important to me, and I have that owner's manual.

To drill a little bit deeper into the— you talked about using your phone to take a picture of it, right? And that creates essentially a JPEG or a PNG type of file that now has become the digital version, right? There are technologies out there now that can basically take a picture of— not only take the picture of the paper receipt, but there are AI technologies that will actually process that digital image.

Mm-hmm.

and will read all the text on that and store that text as additional information along with the receipt. So what's the value of that is, one is, if you ever needed to retrieve the receipt, certainly pulling it up on your phone and seeing a picture of it is a good thing, right? But what about the date of when you bought it and the amount that you bought it and the store that you bought it? Usually, all that stuff is printed on the receipt itself.

That's correct.

And with these new technologies, converting all that text then allows that text to be used in, Searching. Ben, you know how I love searching, right? It's like, when did I buy that, you know, TV? Or I think I bought it at, you know, Best Buy or whatever kind of mentality on a certain date, right?

Can you tell he wants a new TV?

I do, actually.

He does. It's always very much the TV.

Prices keep coming down and TVs keep getting bigger. It's a pretty cool concept. Anyway, so the whole concept around digital is not just taking the photos of the individual receipt, but it's the AI that converts it to text. That makes it searchable. And then one other sort of nuance that I want to sort of guide people on is it's what I call multi-page documents and single-page documents, right? So a scanner is very good, like a hardware scanner or a printer like you said, when you have a document that's let's say 5 or 10 pages and it's in paper and you sort of feed it through and essentially it's going to create one PDF that's, you know, 5 or 10.

It replicates the document.

Right, it replicates the document versus mobile phone and the technologies around taking a photo and a receipt, it tends to be good for what I call single-page documents. It's that single receipt.

I agree.

It's that single invoice, because the technology hasn't evolved to make it super easy yet to try and take like 10 photos of 10 pages of the same document and try to combine that into one PDF, right? So, you really need to also think about the different sort of types of documents in terms of Are they going to be multi-page documents or single-page documents? Let's evolve this discussion into, okay, I'm creating PDFs, I'm scanning all these things. Now what are my choices over where to store them? Right. Okay. So I've— it's a multi-step process. First, I've scanned them or I'm taking photos of them and I've got all these PDFs primarily. Now what do I do with them? What's your opinion or options that you see there?

Yeah, well, sometimes those scanned documents automatically get linked To either an email client or your personal laptops or computers and/or your phone. So that's the first thing. Sometimes it's automatically stored in there once you've taken a photograph or scanned something that's tied to computers. That's one area, and then you are responsible as an individual to go in and create some sort of organization in a file system within. Your computer or phone system. That's one area. The second area where people can also take this information is store it in secure sites that allow you to store documents because that's their business model, so that you can either share it with somebody else in the future or you can come back and review it in the future. But you can all— you also need to start creating some level of organization. Because then you're just going to have a system of just piles of documents. And all of a sudden, you've got this, this wonky system again. But some people love search. So maybe having that system of wonkiness still is beneficial because of the search capability. Yep. And I think beyond that, some people may also want to take those documents And they have to find a way to centralize them because all of a sudden what we've just described is you've got documents on your phone, like receipts, you've got other documents on your laptop, and you may have documents in a different digital system.

I call it digital clutter.

Yeah, it's definitely digital clutter.

Even though it's digital, it's stored on different devices in different places. And it's sort of like, okay, I've got them all digital, but it's cluttered in different places.

I've been there. And it's easy to get there because there's so many tools, digital tools out there that everyone's using for work and for personal. And that's the other thing to keep in mind. Do you want to mix your work and personal aspects of documents? I personally do not.

You like to create a border around, here's all my personal documents and they're stored here. My work is over here and sort of create, you know, kind of a boundary, a hard boundary around that.

Yes.

Yes. Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, in talking to customers and talking to friends, right, again, going back to that different age group, right? Some people are like, I'm going digital and they're going to store it on a laptop, on a computer in the house, which is a great step and you can still use search, but there are cons to just storing it on a laptop, right? The laptop gets stolen, your house burns down, the hard drive goes out.

You spill coffee on it and your hard drive goes out.

You spill coffee on it, right? So it's sort of you've gone digital, but you've only sort of stored it on one device. Now, all your digital documents are stored in one device, and there are, like I said, pros and cons to that, right? Then other people will take that digital device and take in like an external storage drive, right? A thumb drive or a bigger, you know, kind of drive and like put it there. And then maybe that external drive goes somewhere else, right? And it goes back to the—

People can't find it.

Yeah, it goes back to that home inventory, you know, previous episodes that we've talked about, right? Your house burns down. you left your storage device in there or your laptop, your laptop burns up, then what good was it going digital because you couldn't access it, you know, when, when something else happened, right? Then there's what I call generic cloud storage, right? And there's lots of different vendors out there, right? From Google to Microsoft to Dropbox, you know, essentially cloud storage devices where you can save that information. And then there's the 4th category, which is what, you know, essentially what we do in our business, which is the digital home management piece.

Yes.

Which is, Just because you have all your documents stored in one place, those documents are usually related to your maintenance calendar or your remodel project where you're tracking a budget or you're tracking your home finances over what your home's worth and how much balance is on your mortgage. So having a relationship between sort of all the other aspects that you need to do to manage your house and having those documents all in the same place, we think creates a tremendous amount of value because they're all kind of brought together again around what you referred to, which is— a hard boundary around a calendar, a storage system, a document system, all around essentially everything about your home in one place. Yes.

And one of the things I like about that as well is if you've taken, let's say, a photograph— because we use that example of the contractor and I took a photograph of the contract with them— if I store that in one place and I search for that, yet I forgot to actually document in some level field or some detail who the actual contractor was on that particular project, I can still refer back to the document because it's in the same system as to who that contractor was. And I've actually had friends who've come to me and asked me who did the resurfacing on my pool as an example, because they needed someone to do theirs.

Right. Yeah. So again, thinking about recommending our audience to think about all these different steps to going to digital from how you're gonna do it. Let's now segue into what I call the value of once you've gone digital, what do you see the value propositions for people who've gone digital in terms of how they can maximize?

Well, I think you said a lot. Search, search, search, search. Just saying. So search is one easy way of going digital.

Well, think about the previous times where you're like, oh, something broke on your stove. How much time do you spend, A, searching your own house trying to find the owner's manual for the stove?

Exactly.

And you're basically wasting time half an hour, hour sometimes trying to find a document versus search. Boom, it's there.

Exactly. And that's a good point. So when you're digital, you stop wasting time. I mean, it's a big deal. You can also save money because you have all this information. And I'll give you a really good example as well. I had some trees trimmed years ago because I don't do it every year. It's one of those maintenance tasks. And I had a contract with a gentleman, but I couldn't figure out who did it, when they did it. I was like really struggling with some things. I don't know why, but I couldn't figure out who the contractor was. And then because of that, I got a new bid at a new time more recently, and the bid came in and we were talking about it. We're like, what? That was re— you sure we're gonna have to pay this money? Because it was really, really, really Did I say really, really, really expensive? And so finally I found the document in Hamzada, and I found the contractor, and I found what I had paid before, and I was like, oh no, this was half the cost. So I went back to that same contractor. They came in with a bid, and it was half the cost.

Yeah, because we forget who you hired a year or two ago, and all of a sudden you're like, oh, I need a quote for tree trimming, and you get a different contractor because you don't can't go back and find the receipt from the previous to even compare prices.

Exactly. So that was. So real dollars that we saved.

Absolutely.

Real dollars.

How about another category of what I call value of going digital is what I call sharing documents with family members internally, right? It goes back to the, if you've got a paper storage system and I don't understand it, then it's going to take me a while versus a lot of these platforms allow you to share documents amongst yourselves. But again, oftentimes, you know, depending on your age of a homeowner, sometimes you may be sharing some of these documents with your adult children, as part of your estate plan? How do you access that information? Going digital allows that family sharing of everybody being essentially on the same page about where all the important documents are to either manage their home or manage their life. Can you think of any other value propositions that we haven't talked about? Or do you want to get into action items?

I think there's another quick value proposition. So we've talked about saving money. We've talked about saving time. We've also talked about accessibility, right? That's the biggest one though. So we talk about search, but I want to talk about accessibility in the, in the way in which if you are traveling or you are in a different location, if you have a system that you can access via your laptop or your phone in a different location, you have accessibility to these documents. And that was one of the things that I was frustrated with.

Yeah.

Many, many years ago is when we were building this house. At the time, I had to be in the physical location I was in order to—

Like a store to buy the air filters or what size are they?

Or even here to talk to the contractors to make sure that I'm on the same page and I'm meeting my schedules because I was traveling 2, 3 times a week. 3, yeah. And I was gone most of the time. So, it's like I had a short window to really get all my information scheduled with the contractors, and that limits any ongoing, um, issues that may arise. And I got to do it from afar, yet I don't have any information with me. All right, so I think accessibility from wherever location you are is also very important.

All right, so let's segue into action items. So I'll start us off in, in talking about, um, what's what I call developing a digital strategy, right? It's good, it's For the people who either A, are completely paper, or B, partially paper, I think maybe one action is think about what strategy you want to take as it relates to, like you said, do you want to digitize all your documents? Do you want to prioritize certain documents? Are you going to, you know, invest in a scanner? Are you going to commit to, you know, mobile apps in terms of taking photos? Part of that is creating that strategy. And then it's also the strategy about where you're going to store that document digitally. So, those are like 2 big key steps is thinking about that process.

Before you get started.

Before you get started, right? And then, you know, it goes back to the once you've done that, what do you want to do with the paper, right? You think about that strategy. Do you still want to keep it in that safe place? Do you want to keep only a section of the documents in paper? You know, it's another sort of action item.

And there's no right or wrong to anything, by the way. It's just your choice.

Right.

That's a lot of people think that there's— you're supposed to do it a particular way. It's not the case. We're just offering up new ways to make it easier for people to really help them manage the details about their house.

I have a few more action items, but I wanted to give you a chance to say, are there any other action items that you can think of that you think would guide our audience?

The biggest one I do think that you brought up is actually prioritizing what documents you want. As I indicated earlier, Having a coffee maker, coffee maker's owner's manual is not something I want to keep. But having a stove owner's manual because I love my stove, yes.

Your mortgage documents and—

Exactly, my mortgage documents, information like that. Versus if I really don't have the receipt or I just can't see it, is it really that important? I think receipts for more valuable items or larger items, definitely. If you buy something that's just a trinket for your table, meaning your living room table, so it's an accent piece or it's your kitchen table or what have you, I don't know that I would actually take that receipt price. That's just me personally. I just prioritize. That's the biggest thing is don't feel compelled if you don't want to, to take every photo of everything. But if you do, Do. Just prioritize.

Right. My, my 2 action items as part of the strategy also is, um, one, it's an incremental process, right? Don't feel pressured like, oh, I need to get all this digital stuff done in one weekend, right? It's like once you've laid out your strategy, you can take multiple weekends, even multiple months to kind of say, okay, I'm going to gradually get to a point where I'm going to convert my paper to digital because I want all that extra value. And my other action item is once you've gotten to quasi-nirvana, which is I've got all my documents in digital, it's the ongoing commitment to staying digital, which is, okay, I've gone through, let's say, 3 or 4 months, I've digitized all my documents, I'm good. And then you have to realize that from that point forward, you're still gonna get paper about your house.

You're building a new habit.

Right, you're building a new habit. It's the, I've gone to the home improvement store and I bought, you know, tools for my kitchen remodel. I've done all these other things. I'm getting more documents about the house, being— having that commitment so that it's not like a big process. It's kind of almost like a daily or weekly or just a habit to form to be able to store those. Beth, anything else as it relates to action items, or do you want to help close this out on this show?

No, I think that we really appreciate your time today. With you viewing this episode. We hope it was extremely helpful for you to become a better, smarter homeowner, and we look forward to seeing you in our next episode of Be a Smarter Homeowner podcast. And by all means, please share this with other people you think would find value in our, our podcast, and also rate us and share our podcast with everyone else because we want to make sure that we're helping make homeownership as easy Thank you for listening to the Be a Smarter Homeowner podcast.

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