Ep 017 - From Roommates to Relationships: The Essential Guide to Home Inventory & Life Changes

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 Be a Smarter Homeowner Podcast. I'm Beth Dodson, co-founder of HomeZada, and with me is John Bedrosik, co-founder of HomeZada as well. John, we've been talking a lot offline about home inventory in previous podcasts. And we talked about the specifics of a home inventory, why it has some value, what we provide in HomeZada. But one of the things we really haven't tied home inventory to is in reference to life events. And I really think we've got an opportunity to talk about life events as in all areas of our product, but specifically right now about home inventory, because people invariably think home inventory is just for disaster-prone areas. And based on some of the things that we've been seeing with our own customers and their usage of HomeZada, that's not the case. We see specific life events triggering them to use HomeZada for a variety of ways. And I thought today we'd talk a little bit about the life events as it relates to bringing people together in the same household, and then also those people moving apart from the same household, and what that looks like. And what I mean by that is, when you come together in the same household, we are looking at people who are— they're not quite married, but they're partners, and they want to try living together before they get married. They are married people who want to come together. They are roommates. for the sake of just pure roommates. And this could be whether it's in a college dorm room or apartment, or actually some other period of life where they're roommates. And then when I was talking about moving apart, is it could be something as we're just not going to live together anymore. You know, roommates moving out, moving in, people uncoupling or divorcing, whatever that looks like to them. But I really think there's value in home inventory and performing a home inventory to make sure everyone is covered, clear, and understand all the elements of what they brought to the table and what's important to them in some capacity. And with that said, you have a lot of data from some of our customers on how they're using home inventory as it relates to this Coming together and uncoupling. Let's start with coming together. What do you see with some of our customers that they're tracking or why they're tracking information in home inventory to bring themselves together?

Sure. I think a lot of the stories that I get from customers, the life event of coming together may be different, right? It comes down to, you've got People who buy a house and they're coming together buying that first house, or, and the people coming together could be a married couple, could be 2 people who are partners in life, but both are sort of invest— co-investing in the same home. It could be a life event of being a renter and moving in together into an apartment. So the concept of, you know, most people that we talk to are clearly homeowners, but there are some that are also renters. And when you come together in these kinds of life events that are surrounded around the physical place that you're actually cohabitating, for lack of a better term, then people are bringing together their personal property, right? They're kind of furnishing their house with, well, I'm coming to the table with my furniture and electronics and you're coming together with your housewares and maybe you're coming with your— lawn and garden tools, and you've got your power tools. So it's sort of this blending of, uh, you know, the personal property that we're coming together, um, to sort of, uh, uh, in this physical place, predominantly a home, but obviously could be a townhome or a condo. It really doesn't matter. But those, those things sort of come together. And then it dawns on people that, you know what, we should probably document what we brought to the table. So they go out and think about looking at, you know, what software they could do to kind of use that. Obviously, HomeZada is one of those opportunities, and it basically allows them to basically go in and create an inventory and essentially with that inventory document the item, document perhaps even where it's located in the actual home. Now, that may seem trivial, right, if you're in like a, you know, 2-bedroom condo.

Sure.

The, the, you know, the sofa is probably in the living room and the mattresses are probably in the bedroom. But if you have a coming together in a bigger home, uh, you know, 5, 10, 15-bedroom sort of, um, house that has multiple rooms, you've got storage closets, you got Christmas tree ornaments. Where are they actually stored? A lot of times people sort of forget about those things. So documenting the item And where it's located in the house or in the garage or even outside the house becomes an important sort of memory recall. And then the, really the documentation of those items really depends on essentially what users are very comfortable with. And we've seen with our customers is that you've got people that are very minimalists as it relates to documenting. And it's sort of like, One picture and that's all. One picture of the living room and that's good. Other people are a little bit more moderate of like one picture of the living room and then a close-up photo over each piece of furniture and/or wall art decorative pictures on the wall. Other people are gonna be, no, no, no, I wanna do that plus I want, I've got the receipt and I wanna take a photo of the receipt and I wanna be super detailed. Or if it's a TV or an appliance, I wanna get the owner's manual. So there's this sort of like, varying curve around what people consider a good inventory when they're coming together.

Believe you me, I know that one because my inventory is super detailed, as you're aware of, and I'm like kind of off the charts, kind of on that scale of how many photos can I take of an item, how many documents can I put in there of things that I have that are important to me because I may need to reference those. Now, when it comes together, one of the things I've seen is when you can track items that are specific to you, for instance, a roommate situation or a partnering situation that you're— you may not be together for a long time. It further keeps it clear as to who owns what, and it can actually help when people say, you know what, I don't want to be the roommate anymore, I'm going to move out, I'm going to take all the things that I brought to the table. Because they may be commingled. For instance, like housewares, it's an easy thing, or kitchenwares, it's an easy thing to commingle. So someone has a really great, you know, Vitamix blender, because, you know, I love my Vitamix, and then, which I had to get really, really sold on, by the way. I asked a lot of questions for those people out there, and this is not a Vitamix commercial, but I do love my Vitamix. But Some people may have like a really high-end food processor, so Vitamix or a food processor, and yes, they do different things. And you want to make sure that people can leave with the things that they brought to the table, especially those types of items, because they can be a little bit more pricier than something else. And I also see when people come together, they oftentimes have possessions that are very important to their family heritage. And I think of some friends of mine that had these antique furniture pieces that they just wanted to understand that these are pieces, even though I'm getting married, these are pieces I want to bring together. And I want to document it. But I wanted to go to the family line that really supports the direct family that they came from, versus, let's say, another family line. So let's say that there's a, there's There's furniture, and this comes to mind. A friend of mine had this antique dining room set from her grandmother, which came from her grandmother's grandmother. And even though she was married, she wanted to make sure it went passed down to her daughter and not to another family member of her husband's, just to keep the succession of that line. And so it was important for them to document their home inventory as they came together because these types of items that are cherished family items were important to go to a particular individual, which we can also document in HomeZada too, by the way. You can tell exactly where you want the items to go to, but that's for another call.

Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, it's actually an enhancement that we made to the product because when we first built HomeZada, it was like, okay, let's document the inventory. And then we started getting feedback of like, well, Can I document who supplied this sort of item so that they could sort of assign it to that in case that 2 parties decided to move in different directions, they would have it documented over who owned which housewares, who owned which power tools, who owned which TV, et cetera. And again, sounds trivial when you're first sort of moving in together into a new home, but obviously if you've been together for a long time, the brain starts to forget these things after a year or 2 or 3. And then you're like, Oh, okay, I'm gonna move on. What was mine? What was yours? Having that sort of documented and being able to separate that is hugely important. And you're absolutely correct. It's the, again, so a little bit about our customer base, right? Our HomeZada customers, it's everybody that's predominantly a homeowner. And that could be everyone from the Gen Zers who can afford to get into a home to the millennials, to the Xers, to the boomers, to even seniors. So as you get to sort of that stage of life where you've acquired a fair amount of stuff in your house, then that goes into sort of that estate planning of like, how do I want to distribute these things to different people? Probably a separate podcast, but it—

Totally.

The system does allow you to essentially, when you inventory your things, break it out by who either owns it or who's it gonna get distributed to in a PDF. So that becomes very easy to kind of look at. You can also do it on screen. And then back to sort of another use case over why the people want to inventory things is, yeah, there is an insurance piece. If you're a renter, you— most people would have renter's insurance. So you want to be able to document what those things are. And if you're a homeowner, you still have home insurance and that's tied to the personal property. Insurance companies like to see the categories of your inventory. So Homesada already has like a prebuilt set of categories. You can customize them yourself.

That's right.

And what I'm saying is categories is like furniture, decorative items. Maybe you have a wine collection and the reason why that, or a sports memorabilia. The reason why those categories are important is a standard renter's policy or a standard insurance policy probably has a blanket coverage. But if those things are sort of have high value, you probably need to get special coverage. So you need to be able to have your inventory system total up. What is the value of my power tools?

Yeah.

What is the value of my wine collection? So that you can sort of have sort of what I call a sub-segmented subtotal of, okay, everything that I own in the house is whatever, 50 grand, but my power tools are worth 15 grand. That's clearly the most important thing for that particular set of user. Or if it's people coming together, it may be, Power tools for one and jewelry for the other.

Totally.

And those 2 things are the most important to the 2 entities. And yeah, the furniture and posters on the wall or whatever, yeah, they're valuable, but not as valuable as those 2 sort of things. So having that categorization becomes important for both splitting things up, insurance, as well as downstream estate planning.

No, that's great. You know, you bring up a good point. So this starts getting us into the why you want to do it for preparation. And then also when people are moving apart. So we talked briefly about a roommate situation where if you're a roommate and you eventually know you're not going to be there together forever, that you're going to want to be aware of what you owned. When you brought everything together, and you can be roommates for a year, for five years, for however long. But you want to make sure that you take what you had, and you mentioned it earlier: you may forget what you had and what you brought to the table because taking your take starting into a new place again, and if you take nothing with you, it's like starting over again. It's extremely expensive, extremely expensive. So you might as well. Bring with you the value that you brought in as a roommate to you somewhere else. And this goes into not only that scenario, but also we have some customers who are looking at using HomeZada from a divorce perspective. And we don't see that as a negative. We see, you know, some of our customers have been married for a really long time in the, you know, 3 decades or so. And They want to do things as fairly and as calmly and compassionately as they can to separate from this long time together. And by the way, just first iota, we're not supporting marriage, we're not supporting divorce, we're not counselors, just FYI.

Do what you want to do.

Exactly. Is that who we are? But we're just sharing with you some life events where our current customers are using HomeZada and It really is helping them move through these processes a bit easier and with more compassion. I mean, let's face it, if you're with somebody for 30 years, then it couldn't have been all bad because you were with them for 30 years and it's just time to move on. And how do you take all the things that you've acquired? Because let's face it, when you've been married for a long time and you've lived in one house, several houses, you've acquired a lot of things and stuff and items that you've earned money to pay for. So how do you do this succinctly? You've been working with one of our customers on how they use HomeZada to do this. Share a little bit more about that so that we can help people understand how this can be made easier.

Sure. So Yeah, I mean, there's been some customers that have basically volunteered that they were going through a divorce and they wanted it to be, you know, an amicable parting of ways, and they're trying to basically split their assets right now. Obviously, there's a whole bunch of assets in people's lives that Homesada has no impact on, but obviously, given what Homesada does, it's the how do we split the assets over the things inside our home that we've been living in together, right? And so this person was basically going through and sort of trying to document absolutely everything that was in their home. And they've been married for quite a long time, accumulated quite a lot of stuff. And you've made this expression before oftentimes, so I'm leveraging what you've told me before, which is—

Sure.

The value of all of the things in your house is oftentimes way more than the, the amount in your savings account or your checking account.

Totally, totally. I can add that up in my house.

Obviously, there's, there's like cash sitting in bank accounts and investments, and that's not our wheelhouse, obviously. But, um, again, if you are at a stage of life where you've, you know, acquired— fortunate to acquire lots of stuff, and then unfortunately maybe there's a mutual parting of ways How do we document those things and bring them up to either some sort of like mutual agreement to sort of split? Okay, you keep that even though you brought it to the table. There may be reasons why one party goes, okay, you can have that.

Yeah.

You can have that. I don't care. This, that, and the other. But maybe you needed to document all of the stuff to truly come out with, okay, do we own $100,000 worth of stuff, $300,000 stuff, $600,000 worth of stuff? And how are we going to split that out given the value? And there's real, what I call economic value, and then there's sentimental value.

Sure.

Right? Which may be another sort of piece, right? So, and I know that from one of our customers is that there was some deadline she was encroaching upon, which was some sort of mediation in her divorce proceeding, right? Right? And so it was kind of like, I've acquired lots of stuff, I've got this deadline in 2 weeks, and we've acquired lots of stuff over 20 years in this house. How fast can I create a home inventory? And again, probably another podcast, but we make it super easy 'cause you can take photos, use AI to kind of document these things, and it makes it much quicker to sort of edit what AI may have gotten a little bit wrong because it's going to create a whole set of data for you. And then not only once you've created the inventory, she wanted to actually print it out because unfortunately mediators and attorneys, even though you can pull it up on your screen while you're in a meeting, people sometimes still want to have that takeaway, right? Get an Excel spreadsheet export or a PDF that shows me all the pictures of the things that you took.

Which is some of my favorite things in HomeZada, by the way. The fact that I can see it on a report and share it with people I need. Love it.

I thought we were trying to— supposed to eliminate paper, and yet people still want paper.

I know, we are, we are. But I send it in a digital format to people. Yes.

That's what I love. Correct, it's digital PDF. One thing I wanted to share though, back on, on your point about, um, coming together and, and documenting an inventory, um, in terms of you said, um, Roommates coming together.

Yeah.

Well, oftentimes there's the roommate concept of 2 people who decide to go and they're going to rent an apartment together. Well, essentially what they're doing is they're probably going to split the renter's insurance between the 2 of them, right? But another renter scenario is one person actually owns the home, the other person is the renter.

Oh yeah.

Right?

That's a good point. I forgot about that.

So one person owns the home, the other person is the renter. There's still the commingling of the personal property, Right? But the person who owns the home also wants to inventory all of what I call the fixed assets of the home.

That's a good point.

Most people think when they think of inventory, they think of only inventorying their personal property, which is, you know, the furniture, the TV, the computer, the super expensive Vitamix. But what about the, you know, air conditioning unit and the hot water heater and the garage door openers? And if it's a renter, right, it's the— but before they move in, like, make sure that, you know, the walls are still clean and the carpet's good. You know, you don't want a renter to damage these things that you're— Yeah, that's a good point. Eventually you don't want to have to replace. So again, a lot more, more and more people are realizing, yes, there's value when we come together in a life event documenting our personal property. But if the life event revolves around home ownership, You still could have 2 people, right, a married couple buying the house together, or you could have partners coming together and both agreeing to buy the house together, or you could have one person buy the house, the other person the renter. There's still that need to kind of document all the other sort of fixed assets of the house because they tend to need maintenance and you want to document those things.

Yeah, which we'll talk about in a further episode. But yeah, I mean, that's a good point. I'm glad you circled back to that because Ultimately, that renter may be leaving for good, especially if that owner either sells the house or does something else with it or brings in a full-time partner or spouse or what have you.

Wait, going back, the owner went on vacation, the renter stayed and threw a big party and had some damage to the house. I'm sure that whoever is the owner in that situation is not going to be too happy about that.

No, probably not documented damage.

But we'll hope that doesn't happen.

You know, like the parties I held when I was a teenager, which my mom knew.

Yes.

By the way, her house was spotless afterwards. She knew we had a party because her house was like over-the-top spotless.

Yeah.

But that's just who I am. So going back to when people are moving on separately, you know, what's some of the value of this? I mean, obviously, we want to help people. The way HomeZada can help people is to have them do this through mediation. They don't necessarily need to make a divorce or an uncoupling a bloodbath, and they don't need to make it adversarial. They can make it as fair as possible, and they can review these areas and the value of these items very succinctly. And I believe some of our customers are actually using our newest features in AI, which we'll also get to in another podcast, but using some of the features in AI to actually help identify the values of their items because they may have purchased them like 30, 40, 20, you know, who knows how many years ago.

Yes, absolutely. I mean, that gets into, you know, a whole, how do you value an item, right? And so, you know, there's the, I bought it yesterday, I have a receipt, I know what I paid for it, that's what it's worth today because I just bought it in and sort of that's There's that level of sort of understanding the value. Then there's the, I think I bought this 2 years ago. I don't have the receipt. What's the value of it?

Right?

And— Come on.

Yes.

Right?

Right?

And it's like, okay, yeah, you bought that flat screen 3 years ago and it was, you know, I don't know, 720p or 1080i or whatever, right? And now, as we all know, flat screen TVs keep going down and the, you know, Resolution keeps going up. So what's the, you may have bought it for $700 2 years ago, what's it worth today kind of mentality? Oh, you know, and then there's obviously things that are even super old, right?

Totally.

So our AI tool does its best job at trying to identify the objects that either, A, you could take like a panoramic photo of everything in the living room and it's gonna identify those objects and come up with an estimated value. Or you can take individual close-up photos. And if it's an individual close-up photo, the AI has more data inside the photo to try and make a better educated guess. And we've built a lot of sort of, you know, where are you located in the country? Are you in San Diego? Are you in Minnesota? All these have a factor in what these things are worth. And it's really what I call time-saving, speed versus accuracy.

Mm-hmm.

Everybody sort of gets frustrated or mentally not frustrated. They think taking a home inventory is gonna take a long time. So because they think it, they procrastinate it and then they don't do it. And then they end up—

And they believe it's never gonna happen to them.

Correct. And then they end up parting ways or, you know, a hurricane tornado comes through and then it happens to them. So it's the, what I call all of our different ways, 'cause Homesatta gives you multiple ways of taking a home inventory. You can take a video of each room, in the house. You can process individual photos of individual items. So it's what I call speed versus accuracy, right? If I just took a video of every single room in the house, you've got a documented video of everything, but it's not necessarily itemizing every single item and coming up with a description and a value. Versus if you process a single photo, it's going to be much more accurate kind of mentality. So Nobody does a home inventory in what I call one login.

No, no.

It usually, again, if it's a 2-bedroom condo, yeah, maybe it's one login because there's only so much stuff. But if it's a 4-bedroom, 4-bath house, usually it's like 1 or 2 rooms a weekend. And it really depends on sort of what level of detail you want. And also one other huge thing that I get asked all the time, like, do I have to take a picture over every single, you know, pot and pan in my kitchen?

No.

And the answer is you can if you want, right? Again—

You can.

What if you've got like high-end copper, you know, pots and pans and each one of them is worth, I don't know, $400 or $500 and you actually literally want detail 'cause you're a gourmet chef.

You're a man.

You're a gourmet chef and you wanna take individual photos. Or maybe you just open the drawer with all the pots and pans there and then you just take one picture of it.

Which is what I do, by the way. Open the drawer, boom, snap. It's like taking my whole closet full of clothes. I take a video, I take a bunch of pictures. I'm not doing that. Those clothes won't be there in a month and I'll have to take another picture.

Correct. So it's, it's, it's the software platform has to be flexible because one user's a gourmet chef and wants to take other things. Other people are just like, hey, we're moving in together and we got, you know, 50 items. They just, we just want to make sure that we're documenting what's there.

Right.

So we give people lots of different options over what they think is a good inventory for their life event. The, like, for instance, the, the person that was going through a divorce, she was taking individual photos of almost everything because she wanted a very detailed— again, 20 years worth of stuff. I want to document sort of every single thing because it's part of a splitting of assets that actually has a financial ramification probably in her overall sort of divorce.

Sure.

If it's— we need that.

She was also— sorry to interrupt you, but she was also using the AI functionality to actually come up with estimated values as well. Well, yeah, that's how—

For the items.

Yeah.

Yes, and the AI tool does it 2 ways. One is you could take a picture of like the living room and process that by AI, and it's going to identify the objects that it sees in the living room, which is usually the sofa, the loveseat, The coffee table, some art on the wall, a TV, and it's gonna estimate each one of those individual values. Or you can go up to the TV, or maybe if you have access to the back of the TV, take a picture of the TV's like nameplate where it has the brand name and the serial number and the model number. And if your photo includes that, then the AI gets a little smarter because it knows that it's a Samsung 56-inch TV that's 3 years old. With serial number XYZ, the estimated value of it is going to be perhaps more accurate than if you just took a photo of the living room and you can see the TV in the background, but the AI tool doesn't know what brand, make, and model and serial number it is.

Sure. Yeah, so that's, that's extremely valuable in extending the use of home inventory when you want to go through this process of we're gonna uncouple, go away, separate, do whatever they need to do, but not stay and remain in the same household.

Correct, correct. And again, it's the, sometimes people go back and update their inventory, but again, based on the value propositions, meaning we're moving in together, we need renter's insurance, and we want to document what everybody has. Boom, let's go get it done. I've acquired a bunch of stuff, new stuff. I need to update my inventory. 2 years from now, we decided to part ways. We want to have more details around our inventory. And candidly, one of the other use cases around it is moving.

Mm-hmm, yeah.

If you're going to move, let's face it, some percentage of people in America are going to move themselves.

Right.

The U-Haul truck, this, that, and the other. Other people are going to hire movers. Your quote with your movers depends on how much stuff they're going to move.

Yeah.

So if you already have—

And you want to document whether it's in there, which we can do a whole podcast on moving, but document what's in there to make sure something doesn't get lost or damaged. Correct.

Correct. Because if you have that inventory up front when you first moved in, 2 years from now you're moving, you're like, okay, I can now send that PDF to the movers and say, give me a quote. This is all the stuff that I have to move. You're using it as a quoting mechanism. The other value is the day they show up, here's the condition of my items when they show up at my new place that I'm moving into. Take pictures of those things to see whether there was any damage in the move process.

Yeah, no, so I think we've, we've done a good job of covering, you know, bringing people together and people moving apart from each other. And one of the things that I think we've communicated well is that a home inventory, even if you want to, even if you don't use HomeZada, but we highly recommend you use HomeZada because we, you know, built it because we love it. But it keeps it fair. It keeps you on top of what you brought to the table and what someone else brought to the table. So it keeps you organized. It can help with mediation. So make something less emotional as best it can to help it be about the items and make it part of your portfolio of what you're dividing. It can also be pretty responsible of everybody so that there is no risk of challenging situations that could occur on the back end. Is there anything else you think that this could provide for people as a value?

Candidly, it's peace of mind, right?

Yeah.

It's the, you know, if in the renter's insurance or, you know, home inventory, you know, unfortunately, if there was a theft at your house, there's that peace of mind over, okay, I documented these things. Maybe I need the serial numbers to recover something 'cause the police ended up finding it kind of mentality. Or I now have documented peace of mind that I can basically prove to my insurance company that I had that. Or it's peace of mind in the divorce situation of like, instead of one party going, I think your power tools are worth, you know, $5,000, and the other party goes, no, they're worth $30,000. That's kind of like a subjective—

That's a big difference.

Yeah, both parties are sort of like way off because they're just sort of intuitively, I just know you have a lot. I just don't know how much you have, nor do I really know what the value of that, you know, bandsaw is kind of mentality.

Yeah.

So it's sort of like that peace of mind, the greater sort of visibility you have on that thing. I think both parties end up with a better peace of mind versus sort of arguing over your guess versus my guess.

Yeah, no, that's really good. And so I really appreciate us talking about these life events because we're really inspired by our customers to talk about these because we know why we personally put Humsada together. But seeing from other people's perspectives, I really think that's important. I think it's important for us to share, and I think we're going going to share— I know we are— we're going to share more life event activities on this podcast. And I want to dive deeper as well in the future on AI and what we've done in AI. I mean, I'll be perfectly honest, I'm not a big user of AI in HomeZada, only because I have been using HomeZada for so long. Like, it's full. Like, I'm a great user and I can share all my own personal experiences, which we'll share a little bit of them. But, um, I'm excited to learn more about AI and actually interview John. About, you know, the AI features that we have. But for this episode, if you are looking to come together with people or there's a separation happening, we, we wish you the best in either scenario. But, you know, you can use HomeZada to take a home inventory of the items. And as John indicated, it can be as flexible as you would like, as detailed or as lightweight as you want. Like, HomeZada is That flexible to allow you to do those different things. So for now, we want to thank you for joining us on this episode of Be a Smarter Homeowner Podcast, and we invite you to share this with your friends, family, colleagues, anyone out there. If you rate us, we would also appreciate that, and you can find us on all the major podcast platforms. So thank you so much for being here with us, and we will see you on the next Be a Smarter Homeowner Podcast.

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