Ep 021 - Navigating the Stress of Moving
In this episode of the Be a Smarter Homeowner podcast, co‑founders Beth Dodson and John Bodrozic discuss how a comprehensive home inventory can dramatically reduce the stress of moving. They outline the many scenarios that trigger a move—downsizing, relocation, college dorms, retirement communities, and multi‑location moves—and explain why documenting every item before, during, and after a move is essential. Key concepts include the distinction between one‑to‑one and one‑to‑many moves, the decision‑making process around keeping, donating, selling, or discarding items, and the role of insurance and damage documentation. The hosts highlight how technology (HomeZada’s AI‑driven photo and receipt capture, barcode scanning, cloud sharing) streamlines inventory creation, facilitates collaboration among family members, and provides a digital record useful for tax deductions, insurance claims, and emotional continuity. They also discuss professional services (move managers, senior move managers, professional organizers) and community‑based solutions like Buy Nothing. A heartfelt senior‑move case study illustrates how a detailed inventory helped a mother transition to a retirement community while preserving family memories. The episode concludes with practical advice: make a plan, document items (photos or video walkthroughs), leverage technology, and use the inventory to guide what to move, store, or discard, thereby turning a chaotic process into a manageable, less‑stressful experience.
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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.
Hello everyone. Welcome to Be a Smarter Homeowner Podcast. I am Beth Dodson, one of your hosts, and along with me is John Bedrosian. We're also the co-founders of HomeZada, and we wanted to talk to you today about another life event. And how to use home inventory for that. And that is moving. Many people will move. I think we briefly touched on it in previous episodes, whether you've got roommates, whether you've got relationship changes, those types of things. But today we want to go into physically moving from one location to another and its various forms. So part of what I see moving as, John, is You're physically moving from one home to another. You're literally getting rid of one of the homes that you've had and you're changing locations, whether it's in the same geography or whether it's in a completely different geography, which we've seen in recent years, like massively happening in the world. Or it's you're stepping into a new location, meaning you may have children in college and you need to get them into a place, whether it's an apartment or a dorm. Or you're not going to release your home, but you want to move into a retirement community because it's less for you to manage and you want to retain that property, the larger home for your children long term, and then they can choose to do what they want with it and a variety of other scenarios. So what are your thoughts about all this?
Most people think moving is just a huge stress, right? Because you hit the nail on the head of about probably 5 different use cases. There's probably, you know, 10, 15 more. About when people think, oh, I have to move from point A to point B. There's this huge layer of like, oh my God, I got so much stuff. What am I going to do with it? How am I going to move? You know, it's the so many different— I'm moving from an apartment to my first home. I'm moving from, you know, my current home to, you know, across the— across town, which is like a half-hour drive. I'm moving across the country. Uh, you know, how much stuff do I own? Do I need one big truck or one little van? You know, so many different sort of stresses that people face when they think about moving. Because let's face it, we all accumulate lots of stuff in our homes, um, and they have to go from point A to point B. And so that becomes a definite process that people need to think about how to create a plan to minimize that stress.
Do you know, I heard a study one time about, uh, from the organizers, and apparently Every home in the United States, when you count up all the forks and plates and dishes and everything else, has over 300,000 items in their home.
Yeah, that does not surprise me. I mean, we just live in a society where everybody's got their favorite little thing that they want to accumulate. And it's great because it provides some sort of a value to them, whether it's emotional or functional or whatever the case may be. But then that value starts to tip into stress because, oh my God, I'm moving from this location to the next. How am I going to do this? So yeah, creating a plan. I guess you wanted to talk about sort of, you know, inventory and, and what its role in playing the moving part. Am I going to hire a mover? Am I not? There's so many different sort of things. So I don't know where you want to go in terms of, you know, having our session today.
Yeah, well, my first thing is like Why is having an inventory important, especially when you're moving? I have my own ideas. I mean, knowing what you own before you leave your house will help you understand, one, do you need to keep it all? Do you need to move with it all? Because you may say, okay, my style is different in another location, or my home is either smaller or larger, and the contents that I have, if it's smaller, Mm-hmm. may not fit because I just don't have that much space, or even just the uniqueness. Maybe my house is bigger, but my room sizes are smaller. Does that really work in that location? And then that's one area where I see having an inventory prior to leaving helps you understand what you can actually sell, what you can donate, what you can unfortunately trash, which I'm not a big proponent of. And There's other scenarios you can use for that, but that's one area. The next area I see as an opportunity to talk about is when you are moving, whether you pack it up yourself and you put it in the pods or you hire a moving company or some other organization to help you move, you have an idea of what goes where in which room.
Right.
Once you get there to the other side to create some efficiencies, and you can also determine What is still arriving? You know, let's face it, sometimes if you're putting things in, whether it's a pod or someone's packing it up for you, someone may have misplaced something, someone may have broken something by accident and forgot to tell you, and it never made it. Or you actually forgot that all the things that you thought you wanted, you didn't put in the pod because you actually didn't want them. So having an understanding—
Exactly.
Having an understanding of what's actually in the pod or in the moving trucks before they go in the boxes. And then I think once you arrive somewhere, you have an inventory that's recalibrated to the new home because maybe you have furniture that you've moved around. You're like, I don't want it in this space. I want it somewhere else. So I just think that that becomes an opportunity for us to talk about having stuff in your existing home, having stuff when you're putting in a moving place, and then what happens on the other end.
Without a doubt, it starts with documenting what you currently have in your house, right? And, you know, more oftentimes than not, that ends up being photos. People take photos of all the things that they have and documenting all that. And that's part of the home inventory process. Once you've documented everything that you have, then, then it's, yes, it's a decision over, is everything that I own going from point A to point B in what I call a one-to-one move? I'm moving from house A to house B. Or is it a one-to-many move where you look at everything that you own and you're like, okay, yeah, I'm going to move these 80% of the things to the other house, but I may end up giving, you know, 5% going to a different storage unit because my other house isn't as big, or maybe I'm giving it to family members, or maybe I'm giving it to charity. So it's what I call the distribution of the things that you have. And one-to-one is pretty basic. One-to-many makes it a little bit more challenging for users because they kind of need to have a plan for that. And also, a huge driver of that is, are you going to do it yourself or hire somebody like a moving company to do it for you? Because as soon as you hire a moving company to do it for you, they're going to end up needing to price what their quote is to you. So a lot of that price has to do with how much stuff are you moving. And the other part of that is the insurance while your stuff is in transit with the moving company.
Yeah.
And it also has to do with documenting the condition of your things prior to you packing them, or maybe the moving company is still packing them. And then what's the condition of those things when you got to your new location? And was there any damage in transit?
So who's responsible?
Correct, right? Because let's face it, I mean, you've moved at least a few times in your life, right? Every time you move, something tends to break or get lost or not get— you know, I thought this was in this box, where do— why isn't it here kind of mentality. So many of those challenges get faced, especially when you're hiring a moving company. So I think having a home inventory in the, what I call before the moving company shows up, and then the after in the new location helps you manage both the upfront quoting process with the moving company as well as the, did they actually perform and did they potentially damage something in the move as well?
That's a good point. And then that also has to do with whether you pack it yourself or someone else packs it as well. I mean, not only hiring a moving company to move physical product through basically transportation. And some people may use the moving company services to pack things up, but some people actually hire professionals that are skilled at doing this as well. And what I mean by that is there's groups called the National Association of Professional Organizers, there's the National Association of Senior Move Managers, and you don't have to necessarily be pure senior to do that, by the way. And then there's home inventory professionals that Can help place these items in the appropriate boxes that will go into the appropriate rooms, but not tell everybody what's in the boxes. And they're willing to take a home inventory of what is in each box so that they can understand where it needs to go and when it needs to go and to make sure things arrive properly without it being— accidentally misplaced because on the outside it said jewelry. Do you understand what I'm saying? With—
yeah.
So they literally can take the professionalism and change the nomenclature to know where things need to go. And that can also help ensure the safety of the items and the peace of mind for the homeowner who's making the move with all their possessions that they found valuable. And hopefully it arrives there as is. Now, a home inventory can't guarantee things are going to arrive there as is and everything else, but it gives you the peace of mind to know this is what I own. This is what I chose to take with me. These are the boxes that these items are in. I've decided to put these boxes in these particular rooms, and hopefully everything that comes out is all beautiful and perfect. And you can put it away in your new kitchen or your new bathroom or wherever, and it's going to be great.
Yeah, I mean, it goes— my view on that is the human mind, even though you own all this stuff, you forget what you own.
Totally.
And if you forget what you own, you're like, oh, I thought I had, you know, 7 power tools, but, you know, 6 only showed up. Well, did you really have 6? And did one get lost in transit? So just the inventory upfront before you move is essentially refreshing your brain over what you own, right? Think about this one, a huge one. Christmas ornaments.
Mm-hmm.
They're usually stored somewhere, you know, in an attic, and people forget, especially you're moving in the summer, you're like, how many Christmas ornaments do we have? Where are all of that stuff, right? So there's so much stuff that's not present in our visuals during the process of living in our current home. We forget all the things that are sort of squirreled away in little closets and attic spaces and basements and this, that, and the other. So documenting all of that is number one, it's a huge reminder to the end user or the end customer actually of what is, you know, what do I currently own?
Yes, absolutely.
Then once they have that great starting point, then it's all that other downstream decision tree of do I wanna move it all to my next home or do I only wanna move a portion of it? And do I, and I think you know a lot of this from the stories that you hear, It's an opportunity to purge.
Yes. Yes. And I'm a big fan of— and so I'm gonna big shout out to the Buy Nothing group. So there's, for anybody who's there, there's a book called Buy Nothing. And some ladies wrote it and said, how do we put less in landfills? And it's literally exchanging items with your local community. And you can find your local Facebook groups to do that. And it's Amazing, because you'd never be surprised of how you can give something that you no longer use a really great home somewhere else. And people find value in that, and you're throwing less in the, in the landfills, which just makes me happy. But yeah, you oftentimes when you're in your new location, you can't always keep all those items because they just don't fit or they don't work from a style perspective, and it doesn't make it terrible. Sometimes these pieces or these items are actually functioning and beautiful. If you can sell them, great. There's ways you can do that through consignment, some other areas. If you can go in your local communities, you can probably sell them through yard sales or what have you. And then at the same time, maybe you have furnishings that you want to pass forward to someone else who needs this, maybe a family member or what have you. When I first got my first house and a friend of mine, I didn't have anything. She gave me some sofas and some plates that were then given to her by somebody else. And then I chose then to do it again to the next group of people. And it's like—
Right.
As long as you keep everything clean and functioning, then you actually have this ability to keep transitioning things to those that may need it just to get them started. I mean, let's face it, when you buy a new house or you're moving to something else, a lot of people may think, well, plates aren't that expensive. When it starts adding up and you need plates and spoons and forks and glasses and cooking utensils and knives and all these other different items without— in your house, even sofas, everything starts adding up. And before you know it, you've spent all this money. that you may not be able to afford because you might be able to, one, purge your own things, but also borrow and accept gifts from other people and then pay it forward in the future when you do have the capital to start buying all the plates and forks and spoons and all the other cooking utensils.
Absolutely. And I know that lots of our customers talk about the purging process when they move. They end up donating it to a charity.
Yeah.
Well, there's the documentation that you donated it to a charity with the value that you want in an inventory system so that you may be able to use it with your taxes, right? In terms of those are considered taxable donations potentially. Certainly not a tax attorney, but recommend people sort of have these discussions depending on the value of what you may be giving away. But again, think about that. Having that inventory of everything that you, that you own, and then you decide, okay, these 20 items I'm going to give away to charity. And if you've already estimated the value of those things, you already have an easy way to kind of produce a report at tax time that says, hey, I moved from house A to house B, but I gave these 20 things away that were all worth X. So here's my potential deduction on my taxes, and I've documented that. Because again, it's sort of like that Here's the inventory of what I have, all the decisions over where it's going, and then what am I— what's on the other end of that box, or the other end of the column, so to speak, in terms of where it went. So taxes and donations becomes a huge part of a lot of people's purge thoughts when they think about moving. It's another important aspect.
No, I agree. And then, so we've talked briefly about Having documentation beforehand, having documentation during the move, and then the fact that you can use third parties to help you do this. Also documentation once you get there into the new property. So I'm a firm believer in just having a home inventory anyway, because it lets you know, one, what you own, 5 power tools or 6, which is important. And that also helps with Any kind of, I guess, discussions or disputes. If you think you had 6 but you only really had 5, are you having a good discussion just with your moving company? Because you may be falsely accusing them of something, and that you don't want to do that either.
Correct.
And so that's really important. But even on the other end, it helps you identify what you have for that property And what you may need. And I'll just take an example of, there's a lot of people that have moved from state to state over the last several years, and the states are just different. If you choose to move, and I'm going to try the reverse, from the southern states to the northern states, AKA, let's say I want to move from Arizona to Boise. There's a shock there to the system, but That's a whole nother story. In Boise, Idaho, you most likely need a snowblower. So you may not already own one in Arizona, but you may need to make that purchase once you get there, or at least right before it starts snowing. And so then you can do an assessment once you've arrived of all the things you have and what you may need in order to live in this new environment.
Absolutely. Could not agree with you more because it's the— what the way I kind of see it is, yes, you're moving from point A to point B. Maybe not everything goes, but point B is in a different climate or a different preference that you do. You chose not to move your current washer and dryer because you lived in a small house with a small washer and dryer, and you finally now have a bigger laundry room and you have a bigger washer and dryer. Yes, I have. You're like, woohoo, we can go buy a new washer dryer. So now, that's not necessarily part of the move, but it's part of the decision of, hey, we're not moving this. But then on the downstream, we need to go buy something. We need to go buy the new washer dryer. Therefore, we need to inventory that for the insurance or the maintenance or the warranty issues because those washer dryers only have so long in terms of warranty.
Good point.
And it's your snowblower example, absolutely. The maintenance requirements of different homes and different clients, Climate may require different tools. Again, giving you the opportunity to buy those things. The inventory software world has made it so much easier now where you can basically take photos of receipts and the AI is automatically going to detect it and inventory it for you. Or you could take a picture of something that has barcodes, like a washer dryer probably has a barcode on the back. So many ways that technology can help facilitate A, creating the upfront list. B, deciding how you're going to distribute that list. C, documenting that it's arrived. And then D, if you've added new stuff to the house, having all that sort of centralized, I think is part of what I was referring to at the beginning is technology can de-stress people because they have it, you know, they have a way to kind of think about all this stuff and where it's going to go and how do I need to track and manage it. That's part of the, hopefully, the de-stressing aspect that software can help.
Yeah. You know, one of the things that we talk about too is I hear from some clients, they may have done their home inventory in their existing house, and you talked briefly about storage units. And I think we're going to go really in depth in storage units on a different podcast. But one of the things they were also talking about is they've got children, children who are at college, who are in an apartment at college, but They've got these items there. Sometimes they have furnishings, sometimes they have computers, you know, monitors, screens, etc., maybe even mini refrigerators, whatever the case may be, depending on the college you go to and the dorm and apartment you live in and everything else. And a lot of the parents will donate the items from their own activities or go buy them. They've been talking about these— some of these customers of ours, they've been talking about, well, we need to actually take a home inventory. And create a room in our HomeZada account and take a home inventory of our child's dorm room slash apartment at college. Because if they contributed items to the place, they want to take those items back each summer or each year. And then they may have more children that are going to go through college, and by inventorying that, they can determine what they gave to the area and the property wherever that child is living. And then they may need it for their next set of kids who go to the next set of college. And so we're hearing some stories like that as well.
Yes, it's the— things have a lifespan and people need to move them from different points. Right. And sometimes they go from the home to college A, and then they come back 3 or 4 years later. And then that same thing goes to College B for a different child. And so again, instead of having to recreate either spreadsheets or a different set of photos every single time, right, that, that's like not using technology efficiently because you feel like you're having to repurpose this over and over and over again every time you move. That's part of the benefit of technology is if you create that inventory once of everything you own, then it becomes much easier to deal with the things that get multiple moves, you know, from house A to house B to house C. Or distributed to different places, or it comes back. You know, candidly, we've got some people that are on the sort of higher end of the wealth scale who are customers of HomeZada, and they have art in a storage unit. And they're like, where— I want that art piece in my new house that I'm moving into in, you know, City X. So they want to move it from the storage unit to the house. Well, then they sell the house and they're like, ah, I'm tired of that. Let's just stick it in the storage unit. I don't need it anymore, right? But they probably have people, like you said, property managers, estate managers, who are sort of managing that for them so that 2 years from now, they're like, hey, where's that painting by so-and-so artist? I really want to pull that out of storage and put that and move it to my current location. And so again, it's so valuable to, I think, have that initial inventory of everything that somebody owns and then using technology to kind of help manage all the different times it gets moved around.
Yeah, I think this has been a really good conversation about moving, but I do want to end on one super, super, super, super sweet customer story that happened. And people can learn from this. But we talked about moving from one location to another. We talked about making sure you manage some of the contents that you have for your kids, but also parents. So this story was so sweet. We had a customer, they were actually a move manager, and they were the ones that were using Hamzatta, and they did it with the approval of the children of this wonderful lady. And the children all lived in the major cities of Texas, but the mom lived in West Texas. And the father had recently died. And they were people who came over from Europe and they had all these different items. And some of these items, they were all packaged, but they were stacked in boxes pretty high in various locations. Well, their mom was petite and they were worried that some of these boxes would fall on her or the house was too big. And some combination of stairs and other things. And they said, listen, Mom, we really need to move you to a retirement community so that you can have more activity, you can have more friends and what have you. And they hired this woman and her team to work on the property. And this move manager was able to take all the different items in the property, document them. determine what was really cool and not necessarily valuable because it's not her belongings, but she was able to set those items aside, review those items with the kids, and say, do you want me to keep it? Don't you want me to keep it? So they would make the determination. And she found some of the coolest, like, old letters and old coins from the 1800s. And it was really, really wild.
Mm-hmm.
And, um, Then she also was able to set aside stuff that was either broken or just really wasn't operable anymore, and that was going to be disposed of. But they were able to keep the house, clean it up a little bit, store things properly within the house, and then take a subset of items and put it into the new retirement community for the mom. So when they moved the mom, she had items of her own space, so she didn't feel as lost because her home was the only thing she'd ever known, but her kids just literally couldn't be there to help take care of her on a regular basis. So this story, I know it's a little long, but it's so sweet. They moved the mom—
No, keep it going. I love it.
They removed the mom into the retirement community with some of her things, and they went through all the different items in the house, kept the house. They weren't going to sell the house. They weren't going to sell all the items in the house. They just kept it, but they had to have documentation of it all because these 4 kids were not close to West Texas anymore.
Right.
And so the move manager invited all 4 kids from all their different locations into the HomeZada account, and they could determine what to keep and what not to keep. And during that process, they also, as children, started identifying the items that they thought would be beneficial to them so that when their mom eventually did die, they knew how to disperse all the different items and who would actually value it the most within the family. And so everybody was allowed to do that within HomeZada, which was beautiful and made the senior move manager's job a whole lot easier. But here's what actually was so sweet about this story. The senior move manager had been working with the mom a little bit, and she knew the mom was really nervous about her kids are going to get rid of everything I own. They're going to get rid of all these memories. They don't understand these memories. And they were so stressed out that the senior move manager took her tablet. And because HomeZada is on the cloud, she took her tablet, opened up HomeZada, showed the mom in her retirement community, just sat with her and showed her all the spaces in HomeZada. Like, I want to choke up and get teary-eyed. All the spaces in Hamzada, and that all her belongings were still there. She said the move manager said the mom was so elated, and she was so relaxed, and so much more at peace that her world changed living in her retirement community because she knew her children just didn't upend everything and just remove everything and get rid of it. And it's almost like her. She had more joy staying in the retirement community and could build better relationships because she understood that the one thing she really, really valued was this house with all these memories and these things that created memories. And her children didn't just abandon all of them. And she was so excited. And the move manager was so excited about this story. She couldn't believe it. She's just like, I'm going to use HomeZada every day. And this by no means was a plug for HomeZada, but I just wanted to share this story because it was such a heartfelt story. of how when you move, your things sometimes provide you memories.
Oh, without a doubt.
And it's important to understand what memories you want to keep and what memories you don't. Some people live minimalist, and that's totally great. Some people don't. But to know that this couple had all these items from the 1800s, it's like maybe they can start their own museum. I think it's just amazing, which leads to a whole nother set of inventory questions when you decide you want to create a museum.
I love it. I love the story. It's amazing. It's, it's, you know, I've heard customers also, especially, you know, older generations of customers, they've lived in the house for so long, they've got visual, they can walk through their house and visually see everything physically. And then a move is happening. Maybe they're downsizing, moving to a retirement community, maybe some health issues. But yeah, having a digital representation of that shown by an iPad creates that emotional connection because you now— it's no longer visual to you in the physical object, but you can see the digital representation of that in terms of where it moved to some other family member, uh, is an amazing story that most people don't really think about when they— when talking about the, the moving of the use case of, you know, people who are a little bit, you know, older in life and the challenges that they face. So.
Yeah, no. So I'm glad we were able to have this podcast. And I'm glad we touched base on a lot of different scenarios as it relates to moving. I think moving is, to your point, stressful for people. And, you know, some people are like, do I really need to take all this stuff? And then some people are like, yes, I still want to take it because I invested the capital And the time to find it. So I might as well take it to my next property or share some memories or what have you. But we've touched base on so many different scenarios of moving, and I hope everybody understands that an inventory is extremely valuable when you are considering that move prior to, during, and after. And any last points you want to make, John, while we're here?
I think it's just our standard summary of— we always tell people, have a plan, right? If you have a plan, then you're much more likely to have less stress because you have a plan to kind of manage the whole aspects of moving. And yeah, it's the— and think about sort of what I call the plan of documenting the things. Some people are very detailed and they'd want individual photos of everything, but even just doing a video of like walking through a room.
Yes.
And you could orate, these are the things inside this room. Even that is a short way of creating kind of an inventory that helps in that move process. So having a plan and technology aspects over however you want to manage your move is going to definitely help you reduce stress during those moving times.
Yeah, no, that's great. So for everyone on this podcast, thank you so much for listening, for being here, and we hope this provided you value on home inventories and moving and why it can provide you some value. And we hope we see you again on another Be a Smarter Homeowner podcast. Thank you so much for being here. If you like this and you want to share this with other people, please do so. And also, for those of you who want more information about Be a Smarter Homeowner podcast, you can visit us at homezada.com, H-O-M-E-Z-A-D-A.com, or you can see us on all major podcast platforms. Have a wonderful day and thank you for joining us.
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