Ep 009 - What to Expect as a First Time Homeowner

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, John and Beth.

Welcome to another episode of Be a Smarter Homeowner podcast. In our journey, we always like to talk about different types of homeowners because it spans so many different generations. So today we're going to focus on one and we're going to let Elizabeth here choose which set of homeowners do you want to focus on? I like focusing on first-time homeowners. First-time homeowner.

The reason why I want to do that is because it's a broad range of homeowners. The Generation Z is now starting to buy homes for the first time. Then we've got the generations of millennial, the Xers, but we also have some boomers who have purchased homes for the first time. So that age span is everything between 25-ish all the way up to 60-ish. So that's a broad range of people who are buying homes for the first time. But in our efforts and understanding of working with our customers, we realized that no matter what your age, no matter what generation you're in, no matter where you live, you still struggle with the same things as a first-time homeowner. So, John, tell us a little bit more of what you understand that our customers have been telling us about their struggles as a first-time homeowner.

Great. And it really starts with most first-time homeowners are probably currently renters. And most of them are renting apartments. Maybe some of them are renting homes, but a majority of them are probably apartment renters. And when you're an apartment renter, you pay your monthly rent and maybe you pay a utility bill and, you know, an internet services bill, but you really don't have to manage, maintain, or improve your apartment.

No, that's usually someone else's job.

It's usually part of the apartment complex's job. So it's a big mind shift of going from being a renter to actually owning your first home. Why? Because the home is such an exciting thing, right? You get all jacked up and juiced up around finally owning your own home.

You get freedom.

Not having to deal with the noisy neighbors right next door on the shared wall in the apartment. But most first-time homeowners think about the home as one, one thing. But in reality, a home is a collection of a whole bunch of different building materials and other assets. It's a roof, it's windows, it's walls, it's doors, it's appliances. It's landscaping, especially if you bought a single-family home that has a front yard and a backyard. All those things come together to make a home, and those things need management, maintenance. Sometimes, depending on what kind of home you buy, you go through an improvement process because you're going to remodel those things.

Yes.

There's more financial costs associated with, you know, managing a home. And so there's just a huge learning curve that people go through from being a first-time— an apartment renter to being a first-time homeowner.

Yeah. And so let's try to drill down a little bit more into maintenance. So this is one of the things we hear from a lot of our friends as first-time homeowners, but also a lot of our customers. They just struggle with maintenance because a lot of them didn't even know they had to do it.

Yeah, I mean, it goes to the, the process of becoming a first-time homeowner is you people get so wrapped up, naturally so, in figuring out how am I going to afford it? Getting pre-approved for a loan, finding the right house, closing, and all that other stuff, right? And then you move in in those first 30 days and you're like, what? I have to manage and maintain this thing? I— they totally forget about it. They don't even know about it, right? So they get hit with this combination of what I call more costs than what it takes to actually manage and maintain a home, as well as the time and work effort to do it, um, because they've never done those things before. So it's a bit of a shock to the system. And yeah, it's a, it's a learning curve that, you know, we're— we and others are trying to help first-time homeowners prepare for those things so that they're better knowledgeable about what that is before they actually close the house and get the keys.

So that we want to help them manage the surprise and by being more prepared. So when you talk about maintenance, what are we talking about specifically that new— that any homeowner needs to do, but especially first-time homeowners? just to understand how to manage the home in its very basics?

Yeah, first and foremost, I'd say most homes do not come with one single homeowner's manual.

Good point.

It's not like buying a car. You can open the glove box and there's the manual to the car. There's no glove box for most homes that you buy. Maybe you're lucky in that you get some, you know, appliance owner's manuals or something that's stuck in the closet from the previous homeowner. So the first step is really like, well, what do I need to do to actually maintain my home? And what are these preventative maintenance tasks? Right? And there's a lot of sources for those things. People can go and obviously use search terms for what do I need to manage and maintain the home? And you can get all kinds of different sites that will give you guidance. There are digital home management apps.

Sure.

Like HomeZada and others that will create a preventative maintenance calendar for you. So the first goal is just becoming aware over all the things that you actually need to do. And then once you start to become aware of those things, I kind of talk about the specifics of maintenance in 2 ways. One is a lot of it is seasonal. Yes.

Right?

What you should do to your house depending on where your house is, is different, right? Because there are things that you need to do in the winter versus the spring and the fall. And so you really want to understand the seasonality of it. And the other way I kind of categorize maintenance is it kind of falls into the, I want to create a good healthy home, which means you're dealing with air quality. Right? You're cleaning filters, you're cleaning windows, you're trying to make sure the air is good in your home. You don't want mold to grow, so you're trying to prevent bad things from happening. You're also focused on maintenance tasks that are what I call safety-oriented, right? There are a lot of things that can cause a fire to start in your home.

That's right.

So, what are you doing to try and manage and maintain and make sure those things are clean so that, A, things don't catch on fire, And then B, if they do, are you prepared with smoke detectors, carbon monoxide detectors, fire extinguishers? Fire extinguishers, yes. It's the, and not only if you have, most people forget to buy fire extinguishers.

Yes.

And then even once you have them, those things fall out of pressure. Like if you've had it for a couple of years, it may lose its pressure. And the last thing you need is a fire to start and your fire extinguisher doesn't have any pressure.

I know that would be the worst.

Exactly. And then a third category of maintenance is there's a whole world of outdoor Front yard, backyard maintenance tasks.

Yeah. If you have a suburban type home or some sort of large property and you're not in a condo, you have outdoor activities or things you have to maintain.

Yeah.

Sorry. One other thing I forgot in terms of categories. It's what I call keeping your home operating efficiently.

Yes.

Right. You have HVAC units, you have a hot water heater, you have garage doors, you have Appliances, washer and dryers.

Yes.

You have all these things that consume energy. So you want to keep your energy costs low by making sure that that equipment is operating efficiently. And it also has to do with sort of keeping hot air in when it's cold outside and not letting it escape and keeping cold air in when it's hot outside. And that has to do with all of the materials that sort of make up that house that also need maintenance.

Yeah, so we just probably scared every first-time homeowner. And that wasn't our intention. It was not our intention. Managing a home is— it can be challenging, but we're here to make it easier. So because of that, there's this— a lot of talk about smart home technology. And there are a lot of smart home technology devices that can help us with some of this maintenance of our home. But help us understand and help all the audience understand what's the difference between smart home technology type maintenance tasks and other types of maintenance tasks? Because my thought process is smart home technology can't do it all for you.

You are absolutely correct. And yes, if you—

Did you hear that, people? He said I was correct.

You are correct.

Yes.

And so depending on if you bought a new home, maybe you bought a new home where your HVAC units have essentially smart home technology built into it. And it might send you an alert of saying, hey, it's time to check something on the HVAC unit.

Sure.

Or maybe you've got a new home with a new tankless water heater and it sends you an IoT alert kind of about things. Maybe you've installed, you know, a security system. It isn't really maintenance on the house, but clearly it's sort of a lifestyle over alerts and warnings. And clearly there's the lifestyle of thermostats and being able to automatically set things up and down. So there is a huge trend in the industry of more and more smart home devices going into the home. I kind of separate them into 2 categories. One is lifestyle smart home devices. I want it colder or cooler in my house, security. And those are sort of day-to-day routines. And then there's the smart home stuff that's gonna remind you of, hey, you need to clean a filter or you need to change something out or you need to check this to make sure that it's—

Smoke detector.

Exactly, smoke detector. So you can operate it efficiently. So all of these smart home technologies are great. But as you said, there are so many other things in the home that need maintenance that don't have a smart home device.

Like?

Gutters.

Oh yeah.

The exterior.

Those can destroy a home if you don't clean those out.

Absolutely. You have a, you have a house that's got gutters, you got trees around it, right? Leaves fall down, gutters get full, uh, rains come.

Water gets in your walls.

Water gets stored in your gutters, doesn't flush out, right? And potential to leak. If you live in a cold area and it freezes, that water turns into ice. That ice turns into an ice dam. All that weight puts pressure on your gutter. Your gutter starts separating from the eaves. Water starts leaking down.

This is like a horrible, horrible discussion. He's just reminding of all the terrible things, but it is real.

But that's the real part, which is— it's— I 100% agree with you. It's the— if you don't pay attention to these things, it can become a big issue. But paying attention to it is not that hard. Yeah, right. I mean, there's so much content and calendar systems to help remind you of these things. Think about when you bought your first home. How did you learn about how you had to manage all this stuff?

I think I learned from watching my parents and then also figuring it out along the way. You know, fortunately, I had a lot of friends in construction and in I guess home development and real estate that they also gave me a lot of advice, but not everybody has that. And so, but I've made my own mistakes.

Right. And other examples of things that need maintenance that don't have a smart home IoT device, right? Your fume hood above your stove.

Yes.

Right. If you're a big cooker, right, you get grease that builds up in that stove. And then if you don't clean that stove, the next time something flames up, right, you get a little spark, a little flame, it catches fire. It's right next to your wood cabinets. It's a cascading effect. Yes. So action item, make sure you have a fire extinguisher in your kitchen.

Yeah.

And clean your fume hood, right? So I could go on and on. Exterior windows.

Yeah, I like the one where you said about— because we talked about this a little bit previous to getting on air— is lawns. That's a brilliant one.

Most renters are not responsible for the lawn in front of their apartment complex.

That's correct.

Now you have a lawn and you have shrubs and you have trees.

There's no smart home device attached to your grass.

No, and the grass needs mowing. Yeah, so you as the first-time homeowner, you have to figure out, A, am I going to buy a lawnmower and do it myself, or B, am I going to hire somebody to do it for me? And that gets into the whole cost aspect of it, of You could, you could basically say lawn care and maintenance is part of a maintenance cost of your house that you didn't, may not have planned for in the beginning, but it's something that you clearly need to take into account now.

So you did bring up cost. I mean, with maintenance, there's, we always have a philosophy to budget 1 to 4%, depending on the age of your home, of the purchase price of your home, depending on the age of your home on maintenance. But you also just described a lot of other costs that it needs to take to manage a home— lawn mowers or hedge trimmers or, uh, air filters or— and although some of this stuff can be expensive, some of it can be, um, extremely affordable. All of a sudden the costs go up.

Yeah, if you're going to do it yourself, right, you need the tools to do it— lawn mower, hedger, trimmer, etc. Power washer if you want to clean your driveways, right? Um, but you're saving money by doing it yourself versus hiring a service to do all those other things. And then candidly, there's also, we didn't even get into this, which is the remodel projects, right? Which is maybe you bought a home as a first-time homeowner where you got a screaming deal on the price point, but the screaming deal means the house needs some work.

Needs a new roof.

And if it's, if it needs a new roof, that's like the first thing you're going to do, right? But then there's the, maybe the structure of the house is good, but you just don't like the old fixtures on the kitchen or the bathroom or the floors, and you want to do sort of lifestyle home improvements there. Uh, and then back to the sort of financials of first-time homeownership, you have property taxes. Those things are— you usually— and insurance.

Like, Jon pauses because I'm always looking at these data points.

And, uh, you need to budget for property taxes and insurance. Maybe you're in a homeowners association, there's the HOA fees. So, you know, there's the internet and security systems and the monitoring of those things. There's the gas.

A lot of people forget about water bills.

You have water bills. Many, many jurisdictions now are going to charge you based on metered water. You've got garbage costs, right? The local company or local cities can come pick up your garbage. So as a first-time homeowner, you really need to think about, A, that 1 to 4% budgeting for what I call preventative maintenance and normal fix-it tasks. B, if you bought a house that has home remodel projects, you're going to need to plan for, A, do you have the money to do those? And how do you want to sequence and prioritize which projects you want to do? Because you may not be able to afford to do them all at once. And then there's just the financial aspects of getting all of your finances aggregated together so that you truly understand beyond just the mortgage payment, the property taxes, the mortgage, all these other costs so that you really truly understand your total cost of ownership.

And one of the things that you're bringing up is, 'cause we said it, when it comes to finances and what have you, it's an annual situation. So even with maintenance, a lot of people feel that maintenance is one and done, and we all know that's not the case. So help people understand a little bit more about why it's not one and done.

It goes back to my concept around your house is a collection of assets, right? Maybe you bought a home that's 10 or 15 years old. Which means your roof is 10 or 15 years old. Your hot water heater is 10 or 15 years old because that's how it all got put together when the original builder built the house. All of those things have a natural useful life, right? You want to do preventative maintenance, like a task many people don't consider, which is I want to drain the hot water heater once, once or twice a year. Why? If you have minerals in your water, it fills up the bottom of your hot water heater, right? And it's on the bottom of the tank and your tank is much more likely to burn out and cause a flood. So, A, the preventative maintenance task is doing those things. But even if you do those things every year, your hot water heater probably only has a 20 to 25 year lifespan, right? So you're going to eventually have to replace it anyway. So it's the— I want to do preventative maintenance because I don't want to have to replace my hot water heater and come up with an unexpected, you know, $2,000 bill that I can't afford. But if I do that small 30-minute task once a year, Sure. I'm going to preserve the life of that hot water heater. So that I'm going to extend it into its useful life as long, as far as I possibly can, so that I don't have to replace it.

Unexpectedly.

Unexpectedly, right? The last thing you want to do is those types of things, right? So there's so many other things associated with, you know, the preventative maintenance. I mean, it's the windstorms cause all kinds of problems with your roofs.

Yes.

Right? And they deposit all kinds of things on your roof, you know, trying to detect if you have an early roof leak so you can patch it. Is a huge preventative maintenance task, right?

Was it ever? Because if you get winds coming in and it pulls off tiles or even shingles from your roof, then water can get in, and then all of a sudden you've got water, and hopefully you've got an attic up there that isn't finished, and you can deal with it. But then that water can just keep coming down floor after floor after floor, and all of a sudden you just you've just got a mess on your hands.

Exactly. It's a balancing act. I mean, essentially, we're always as homeowners trying to prevent. bad things from happening and preserve the life of those things so that they, they— I don't have to come up with more dollars to replace them. And that just becomes a, for lack of a better term, a routine that a homeowner has to learn, right? It's like an act, it's like a workout routine, right? You got to force yourself to go to a workout.

Absolutely.

You know, if you want to get healthier, you want to keep your home healthy and smart and safe, you just need to get into that, you know, continuous routine over Doing these preventative maintenance tasks, and it's not that. I mean, I know we're talking a lot, and maybe we're scaring some first-time homeowners, but candidly, it's not that big of a deal as long as you know what needs to get done and you space it out. Right? It's like oh, fifteen minutes, twenty minutes to do three or four things. You know, two or three, one or two Saturdays a month.

Right. So speaking of that, you know, just to start getting some other details, a lot of first-time homeowners may be afraid or lack confidence. To do some of these tasks. So, some of these tasks are really simple. Changing an air filter is actually really simple for the most part. I mean, you may need a ladder or something else.

As long as you can find where the air filter is. That's true.

That's true. And because—

What does an air filter look like?

Well, it depends. Well, I mean, I hate to say that because—

What do yours look like? They're square and they're little grills.

They're rectangular.

Rectangular, yeah. And they're usually in a ceiling or a wall somewhere.

Correct. And a lot of people don't always pay attention what's in their walls. So it's just being on the lookout for where they are. But it is kind of an easy thing to replace versus— and even, um, we talked about this earlier as well, even a toilet stopper.

Yes.

Inside the toilet back—

Tank.

Tank. It's easy to change out yourself.

Yes.

For the most part.

So it's a little rubber flapper. When you flush your toilet, the water in the tank goes into the bowl and it flushes, right? And they wear out. And then when you hear your toilet running, Which is wasted water. Which is wasted water, which is increasing your water bill.

And bad for the environment.

It's, uh, it's like a $10 fix to go to the, you know, home improvement retail store and buy what's called a toilet flapper. It's a little rubber thing.

Remember, you have to turn off your water first before you do that.

Yeah.

And there's a little knob.

Yes, yes, absolutely.

So, um, but speaking of that, if, if we just explained that some of the things they can do themselves If they wanted to hire somebody else to go do some of these tasks. So, um, one of the things I can think of for people who have yard work, and it's easy to mow a lawn. I mean, both of us have done it many times in our lifetime, but maybe somebody doesn't have time to do it.

Mm-hmm.

Or they don't wanna make the investment into the equipment to do it, and they just don't feel confident in that. They can hire people to do that. What would they need to look for in individuals? to help them find those types of services?

Sure. So for lawn care purposes, my experience is most lawn care service companies tend to work within a neighborhood or geography of a city, especially if you live in a larger city. They may not want to service houses that are, you know, 20, 30 miles apart. They like to get all of their lawn customers all within a close drive because then they can do multiple houses in the same, same day, right? So With lawn care, candidly, it's meet your neighbors and find out from them because many of them may have a lawn care service. And candidly, you can see the quality of the lawn care if they tell you who they're using. Are their trees trimmed? Are their shrubs trimmed? Does it look clean? You get reference from neighbors, right? There are platforms like Nextdoor, right? Where people belong to those kinds of platforms, you can probably get referrals there. There's also other platforms like Angie's List, Porch, HomeAdvisor, Home Depot, Lowe's, etc. They all have sort of networks of people that they vet for different types of services. So those are different places, but specifically for lawn care, I kind of go back to the sort of the neighborhoods. The neighbors would be the best.

That's smart.

The other thing I tell people as it relates to maintenance is, yeah, changing an air filter is pretty easy, right? You got to buy the right size and get a ladder or whatnot, open the grill, Swap it in and out. Cleaning gutters, also relatively easy, but there's a safety factor associated with it, right? You got to get up on a ladder. If you have a 2-story house, the ladder is a significant climb. Maybe you're young and mobile and ready to take that on, or maybe you choose not to do that and hire somebody who's a professional who's got sort of the right kind of ladders to get out and clean those gutters.

Yeah.

Right, so it's personal safety as well as kind of like skill sets. that usually tend to fall of like, maybe I shouldn't do this myself. Maybe I should hire somebody to do this for me.

Or you're afraid of heights like I am. So I'm not cleaning out gutters. I have a friend who does that. So we've talked a lot about what first-time homeowners can expect. And I think there is a lot that you need to do as a first-time homeowner. And we've broken it down a bit into Hopefully making it easier for them. But is there anything else you want to leave first-time homeowners with as we close out this episode?

It's the be constantly aware of your house, meaning even though you're doing preventative maintenance things, if something seems odd to you, like a room is colder than it normally is, right? Or you notice some discoloration on a window screen or something, right? It's like paying attention to those little things in your house. I know you're very good at that with your house. And, when you spot some of those things that are somewhat not normal, usually it could mean that something is wrong, right?

Yeah.

And, you want to take a little chance to sort of fix it. For instance, the whole, this room is getting colder than it normally does. Candidly, a lot of that is Sometimes your HVAC ducts connect to a vent, and depending on how old those ducts are, the ducts start to sag over time.

Oh, that's very good.

And the duct disconnects from your vent, right? And so if it's in the wintertime and you're, you're heating your home and the room is cold, maybe it's cold because your duct has been disconnected from the vent and you're heating your crawl space and you're spending money uselessly.

Yes.

Right? Relatively easy fix, right?

Now granted, you may have to go crawl under your crawl space in your house, If you have those, for those people who have basements, you do not have a crawl space.

Exactly. You go into your attic and maybe do it up there and you basically just reconnect it. It's not that big of a deal, but that's kind of one of those other, like what I call tips for first-time homeowners is just be aware over how your house is performing on an ongoing basis and notice those little changes. Because if you take the action to troubleshoot them, so to speak, um, it's going to help out. I'll give you another example, right? The water pressure in your shower head is reduced. And you're like, why am I not getting as much water pressure? Again, going back to there's minerals in sometimes water.

Yep.

Your shower head has all these little, um, um, sprayers, right? And behind it may be some sand or a pebble that got in there, and that's why you don't have any water pressure in your shower.

Yeah, clean them out.

Basically clean them out, right? And you got water pressure. Here's another example. Your clothes take longer to dry.

Oh yes.

Why do your clothes take longer to dry?

'Cause someone didn't clean out their dryer vent.

Yes, and most people don't even realize that the back of your dryer is connected to a vent that goes to the outside. And depending on where your dryer is in your house, that vent could be considered a long vent, which gets filled with lint. And that lint traps the hot air in there and it doesn't work as efficiently. And it's a maintenance task of basically cleaning the back of that dryer vent.

And this is a different vent than the vent you pull out of your dryer and you scrape off the lint that you can actually see.

Yes.

This is much thicker, much wider, almost like a giant tube, for lack of a better word.

Yes.

And lint builds up in there.

Yes.

So just make sure you understand there are technically like 2 types of dryer vents. On your dryer, one that you can manually pull off the information, which you still need to do that too, but also the one in the back. And as you indicated, if your clothes are taking longer to dry, it's costing you more money, you're using up more electricity. It's just, it's just a downward spiral of how do I actually save money as well as be a good citizen of the world.

Yep. Action item, 2 action items for people, right? One, go look at your dryer and look over the edge at the back and look at that little tube that's connected to the back of your dryer. That thing needs to get cleaned out once a year. And my other tip is basically create a system that creates a preventative maintenance schedule for your house, right?

Yes.

Because let's face it, we all want to be consumed with fun things in our life, travel, kids, entertainment, going out, eating, entertaining. Nobody really wants to think about, you know, home maintenance. And so, why consume your brain trying to remember all these things? It's better to create some form of calendaring system that's just set up once. It's just going to remind you and send you a push notification that says, hey, it's time to clean the dryer vent out, right? Those are my 2 action items. One is practical, educate yourself on the back of your dryer and create a schedule for yourself.

Yeah. And, I'm a firm believer The action item I always say to everybody is be prepared and be aware as much as you can about your house. And that starts by taking an assessment and walking around and just paying attention, as John said. And then if periodically, month by month, as you're performing your maintenance tasks, make sure you understand if anything has changed. And, uh, yes, I am very good at that because I do that frequently because I want to make sure I get ahead of any potential risk to my house because I want to make sure that my house is valuable. It's a great asset and it is operating properly and that I'm not creating damage to it. Like John was explaining, there's a lot of cascading effects if you are not addressing it.

Go ahead. Any more— you want more closeout for me?

Sure.

Uh, yeah, the other part of it, we touched on it a little bit, which is if, if your house has remodel projects, again, planning is the best key. Uh, all the time, create a list of the potential remodel projects that you want to do. Start to go to home improvement stores to shop for different products that you need. Create yourself a budget Because you want to know, how am I going to pay for these home remodel projects? And then lay out the sequence over which you want to do them, which becomes kind of a combination of money that you have and priority, right? Do you want to replace the, you know, carpet in the bedrooms, or do you want to remodel the bathroom?

Yes.

You may not be able to afford to do both. So kind of create that kind of financial plan over those projects. And then the last piece, it goes back to the track your financials. Right? Track your property taxes, your HOA fees, your energy utility bills, gas bills, so that you truly understand what your total cost of ownership is. Because clearly you want to minimize all those costs because it'll free up your financial resources to go back to the other thing, the fun things in life.

That's correct. So I think with that, we're going to close out this episode because I think those are all great points that John has brought up for us today. So thank you all for joining us at Be a Smarter Homeowner Podcast. We hope you liked our podcast and this information. And if you did, please rate us on all the major podcasts, but also please share our podcast with your friends, family, and colleagues who you know own a home who may need some more assistance and more help on simple little tasks and tips on how to be a better, smarter homeowner. Thank you so much, and join us again for the next episode.

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