Ep 051 - What Every Smart Homeowner Tracks (But Most Don't)

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.

Hi, welcome to Be a Smarter Homeowner Podcast. I'm Beth Dodson here with John Bedrosik, your co-founders of HomeZada and host of this show where we talk about all things home. Now, question for today. Do you use electronic calendars to track the details of your home? I personally do. That's why I have a HomeZada. But John, I'd like to hear a little bit about your experience with calendars and why you like them and what you track in them.

Yeah, I mean, I guess I'll start with when you think of a calendaring system, most people think of, you know, it's bundled with their email of whatever choice they want, you know, Google Outlook, Hotmail, Yahoo, whatever. And a lot of them tie to your profession, your job, because oftentimes people who work for big and small companies, they're given email calendaring systems. And what does a calendar system do? It allows you to basically not remember everything up here and it just tells you and reminds you of sort of what things need to get done from a work perspective. So I think it's massively important in life is to have a calendaring system because it eliminates you having to remember things. Now, if you tie in the concept of a calendaring system for your home, most people probably try to use their current work calendar or even personal calendar, and they start to combine what I call different calendaring events. Everything from like birthdays and holidays and vacations tied to things that they may try to put in of like, oh, so-and-so is coming to my house next Friday to replace my dishwasher or whatever the case may be. Maybe some of them will even try to do the recurring tasks. And so a lot of people get what I call calendar clutter because they're using one calendar for essentially personal, professional, house all mixed together.

Yeah.

For some people it works, for other people Digital calendaring cluttering becomes an issue where a lot of them will now create different calendars, one for work, one for personal, one for whatever, and one for the home.

Yeah. No, in fact, I like to separate my work and my home calendar, meaning for my home tasks, because I'd like to create an environment where I can focus. And if I get distracted, by home-oriented stuff versus work-oriented stuff, then it doesn't serve me. And I know there's color coding and what have you, and oftentimes I'll do that, but I really truly like my household tasks separated into a separate calendar because the house is complex. It has a lot of different parts and pieces. You have a lot of different projects going on, whether it's maintenance tasks, projects, This, that, the other. And I definitely don't want that reminding me while I'm at work. I need it to remind me later, off hours. Off hours. That's just a distraction that doesn't serve when you're trying to work.

Yes.

Now, you know, I talked a little bit about my home because we're going to talk about the home calendaring system and why it's valuable. But I track maintenance tasks, project-oriented tasks, um, even updates to my home inventory as a task because I update my home inventory regularly. And I do it, uh, seasonally, but also I do it yearly. So I, I have like annual reviews for things and stuff. What do you think most people are either missing or don't understand why tracking all this information is critical to helping them manage their homes more effectively.

Yeah, I think it has to do with kind of like trying to align 2 or 3 different things together. One is the location over where your home is.

Yeah.

Is oftentimes tied to weather and the seasonal patterns, right? If your home is in Florida, the seasons are slightly different than, you know, Washington or Minnesota.

Correct.

And then as it relates to maintenance, there's what I call the recurring tasks that you should do either once a year or twice a year or 4 times a year. And oftentimes those tasks are dependent on the season.

Right.

Meaning you're not gonna fertilize your lawn in December, but you might wanna fertilize your lawn in springtime. And maybe you live in a place where you wanna fertilize it twice. So it's the combination of the recurring task, the frequency of that task.

Yes.

The seasonality of how often it needs to get done and where your actual home is, which is why I think creating a specific calendar for your home is a lot of what is missing. Now, granted, I know a lot of people who've actually done this with their work calendar. They've created a work calendar and they've tried to create all these things themselves. Absolutely. It works for them. For us with HomeZada, we basically made that easy for you because we do it all for you upfront.

Meaning create the calendar task items.

Yeah, exactly right. Like cleaning the leaves in your gutters. Again, typically a fall task because that's when the leaves are falling. So aligning which month the task needs to get done as well as that constant reminder, that I think is the biggest thing that's missing for most homeowners. And it's also the thing that then, if they don't do that, leads into trouble, because then you can start to increase costs to own your home, because you're not doing these things.

Yeah. So if you— so the benefit of taking, tracking your maintenance tasks is one, you get to free the brain to do other things. That's a benefit.

It does.

I just believe systems are here to help us so that we can focus on bigger, better, wonderful things. That's just me personally. 2, our memories oftentimes forget what we need to do, and especially those wonky tasks. And what I mean by those wonky tasks is garage door springs, lubricating them and changing them out is a 7-year task. When's the last time we did it? I look in HomeZada to determine because I don't remember when 7 years ago was that I changed and oiled my springs. And so it's easy to forget those types of one-off tasks. And then the other thing I see as a benefit is if you've completed a task, meaning one party of a home, And then there's other people within the home, whether it's a spouse, adult children, older parents, property managers. When one person does it, using a system helps to know when the next person needs to do it or they're not duplicating, which is also wasting money. I've seen that happen plenty of times.

Yes. Many people who are married couples have the simple The husband does the outside tasks and somebody else does the inside tasks. But that may not always be the case because some may be like mechanically oriented and then others are cleaning tasks. So you get into the types of tasks. Some of them have, you know, they're riskier tasks to personal safety, right?

Yeah.

Because you got to get up on ladders, prune trees, operate power equipment, all those kinds of things. So yeah, a callaring system helps divvy up the tasks between the occupants of the home, as well as third-party contractors and service providers that may be doing those tasks as well.

Yes. And what I also think is, it's so we've got our memories, we've got understanding how to divvy things up, and literally just getting those tasks done. Now, What are all the benefits of completing those tasks in a timely manner?

I mean, it's the biggest thing is it's the reminder to do something that may take you 15 to 20 minutes that avoids a $1,000 or $5,000 repair. Oh yeah.

It's like changing the air filter.

That's basically being proactive by the calendaring system reminding you of what your brain doesn't need to remember. Clean the gutters out of the, you know, clean the leaves out of the gutter minimizes your gutters basically breaking off in a big rainstorm or a snowstorm and causing all kinds of damage. So it's literally the reminder to do small tasks that usually only take 10, 20, maybe an hour, maybe a little bit of cost, prevents downstream huge fix-it-and-repair costs.

Yeah, I also think it also, um, by doing these small tasks, it enhances your health.

So absolutely.

So I'm like doing the reverse, saying the positive. Well, if you're not changing air filters, then the risk is the air quality in your home is affected. If you aren't cleaning out your windowsills, the air quality when you open your windows is affected. When you are not—

Not washing your screens. Yeah.

When you're not looking at smoke detector batteries and carbon dioxide monoxide detector batteries, it could literally be your life is at stake.

Yeah.

And so I think that checking all these different elements around your house, even something as simple as deck railings, I know this time of year is Deck railings, if anything is loose, then someone could fall. So we want to make sure we're protecting the health and the safety of someone as much as the expenses that could come from this. And let's face it, if you fall off a deck because a railing was loose, then it could impact your expenses, not just your health and your safety, because you may be out of work for a period of time. You may have to go to rehabilitation. You know. You may have to go to hospital bills. All these things compound if you're simply taking small measures to course correct and maintain, and using a calendaring system helps with that so you don't have to remember it.

Yep, 100% agreed.

Now, one of the other things is seasonality. You talked about it briefly before. Seasons are an easy way for people to start doing tasks, and spring and fall tend to be some of the biggest seasons where we do tasks. Spring because we want to open up our house, fall because we want to start to close it down, depending on where you are in the country, because obviously Florida is a unique situation. Same thing with Arizona. It may be the reverse. But what other seasonality component components Does it require from a calendaring system that helps us stay focused?

In terms of maintenance?

Yeah, I have one.

Yeah, I mean, I'll go to winter and summer, right? Summer tends to be the biggest usage of your air conditioning units, right? So you want to, like, for instance, the side of your house has an air conditioning unit that basically needs free airflow.

Mm-hmm.

In order to work properly. And you don't want a tree overhanging it 'cause you don't want all of the leaves and berries blocking that free airflow. So just even the simple maintenance of making sure your air conditioning unit is free and is getting free airflow will help continue to make that unit run more efficiently and not have to be more susceptible to bigger fix-it and repair tasks. The seasonality in the winter oftentimes ends up being a lot of places across the country do drop below freezing, and that becomes pipes freeze. So it's really insulating your pipes and making sure you know where the shutoff valves are, because you don't want any pipes to break during winter.

Yeah.

Because then you have a bigger, much bigger problem.

Again, that half-hour task prevents, you know, a $10,000 claim with a $5,000 deductible and a whole bunch of pain and So I'll tell you one of the things I thought of, the reason why calendaring is so important, because once spring hits, you get this beautiful weather, which you need to be outside to do some of these tasks, because being winter doesn't prohibit or prohibits you from doing some of these tasks because you need warmer weather. But spring hits and nobody wants to do these tasks. So a calendaring system helps remind you to get them done before full-on summer sets in.

Yes.

And then same thing with fall. All of a sudden kids are back to school and all of a sudden we got football season. We got all kinds of things happening.

Exactly.

Exactly. And people are like, I don't want to do tasks, but they need to prior to the winter prohibiting them from doing it. So I'm a firm believer in calendaring providing that benefit, keeping us on track. Versus getting distracted by the beautiful weather and all the things that need to get done.

Mm-hmm.

And so there's that. Now, one of the things that we didn't talk about from a calendaring system is there's things like managing warranties and insurance reviews and other type of property information. Let's talk about the warranties to start. Why is using a calendaring system valuable from a warranty perspective?

Yeah, I mean, it goes to the, you know, people buy things for their home, you know, a television or new refrigerator. Maybe you actually replaced your hot water heater. Knowing what the product warranty period is and just entering in the date over when that product warranty is expired in a calendaring system will then typically give you a reminder, maybe a 30-day reminder before that day arrives. Because if there is that something that's broken or not working correctly, You can save yourself money because the manufacturer will send somebody out to fix it while it's still under warranty. And that's one of the biggest things that most homeowners miss. Don't track at all, which is they're buying stuff for their home and they're not logging in the warranty expiration date. Then they're like, oh, something's not working. Why? I'll get to it later. And then when they get around to it, they realize, oh, the thing, the warranty expired 30, 40 days ago. If I had just been reminded 30 days earlier, I could have got that thing fixed and I wouldn't have had to come out of pocket to pay for it. So tracking warranties for the things that you buy in your house that have a product warranty, a calendaring system is great because it's going to send you that reminder of like, hey, this is about to fall out of warranty, fix it now and it won't cost you any money.

Yeah, no, I think that's a great one. And then let's talk insurance review. I know Personally, I go through my properties and look at all the things I've purchased throughout the year and all the things I've updated into the properties throughout the year, and I update them in my home inventory because I need to compare it to my property contents coverage in my insurance policy. So Tell us why that's really important to a lot of homeowners, but a lot of people miss it. They don't do it.

Yeah, I mean, it's most home insurance policies are on an annual basis. So you have a start and a finish date. And it could be that that is pretty much not seasonal. I mean, you could— it just depends on when you bought your house and bought your insurance. It could be January, February, any one of the 12 months. But knowing when it's expiring, Gives you the time to assess upfront before it expires. A, do I need to change something in my policy? Or B, potentially it's like, hey, maybe I want to go out and shop for a different policy and I want from a different vendor, and I want to do it before my current policy expires so that I'm not sort of exposing myself to that risk of not being insured for that period of time.

Yeah.

So that just becomes a huge reminder that again Yeah, people, if you were to— I would, I would guess if you were to ask 10 random homeowners, when does your insurance policy expire, maybe 2 out of 10 would get it within the month. The other 8 would be like, yeah, I don't know, I forgot, it's buried in my desk.

And they're waiting for reminders to be sent to them.

So, exactly.

So, yeah, so, so we covered—

You want another one?

Sure.

Property tax.

Oh yeah, it's another one.

Now, for some people, property tax is embedded in their monthly mortgage bill.

Sure.

It's just sort of taken care of. But other people, a fair number of people are basically just paying their property tax not embedded in their mortgage. And most counties across the country give you 2 choices. You either pay your property tax at once or maybe split it out into 2 different payments. A lot of times, if you're not, if you're not calendaring that and being reminded of it. We actually had a Homesota customer say that they were reminded to pay half of their property tax in this specific month. Because if they had missed the payment, it was like a $700 penalty because they paid it late.

Yeah, that's right. That's a real life example of cost savings.

That's a real life use case of like cost savings of That being late on your property taxes can be really, really expensive. And just having a calendar reminding you of that is hugely important.

Yeah, no, I totally agree. Now, is there anything you can think of other than what we've talked about— maintenance, property taxes, insurance, warranties— that people need to be reminded of around their home of Yes, you can. Yes. Okay. What is it?

Well, maybe it falls into 2 categories. One is like a lot of it has to do with people that are servicing your house.

Yeah.

I.e., like we live in Northern California, so we have which week is green waste and which week is recycling.

Oh, 2. Point taken.

Some people just literally want that sort of reminder in a calendaring system so that they don't have to sort of remember it or go to their waste management company to Figure out what it is, and if it's going to be every other week, you could just create that kind of calendar system to remind you of those things.

Kind of mentality.

And then it becomes because you have a calendaring system, it's also a lifestyle thing. Some people just literally want a reminder to pay their bills.

Oh yeah, good point. Yeah, they do.

Like I want to like some people go like I want to pay my bill. I want to pay my mortgage on the tenth of every month.

Yeah.

You just set up a reminder that says, pay my mortgage on the 10th of every month. Other people like, yeah, the bulk of my utility bills, I want to pay all at once because I don't want to have to constantly log into my online bill pay. You know, I want to bundle them all together and I'm going to do that on the 20th of the month. So you can almost say like all the regular payments that you're doing, you could set up like personal reminders that are still home-related. They're not maintenance-related. They're more about, I just need to pay these things because I don't want late fees. And I just need to be reminded of these things. And that's just another great example of how a home calendaring system is going to help you save you money and reduce that mental clutter because something else is reminding you.

Oh my gosh, yes, that's so true. Like all these different elements, you don't think about managing a home and what it takes to manage it until You get all of these components from bills to property taxes to insurance reviews to maintenance tasks to warranties to all these different parts and pieces. How are you managing that? And a lot of people are doing it in their head, which I think is crazy, only because it's it's easy to forget. It's easy not to stay on top of something, and it's also. Just time-consuming in your brain. I think it's a mental overload that you don't need because systems exist, and then you can focus on all this other beautiful creative work that people are doing out in the world, um, to really make a difference in their lives and others.

Yep, yep. And even, even on the maintenance, it could be like you have a pool service or a lawn service or a cleaning service. How often are they coming? Are they coming once a week, twice a week, once a month? Putting that on a calendar is another great reminder. I even got another one from a customer like 2 weeks ago, which is they had multiple properties, so they had renters. So they wanted to track when's the lease expire.

Oh, good point.

Because they want to know whether before the lease expires, if their rent— I mean, A, it's kind of a 2-way street, right? Does the renter want to renew the lease? Does the landlord want them in there kind of mentality? But just a reminder of when lease expires on any rental properties is again another calendaring system that you could put into a calendar specific to rental properties that you own.

Yeah, that's a good point because especially short-term leases are sometimes easy to process, but long-term leases, you forget when the person signed up to lease the property. It's a year, 2 years, 6 months.

Do you want another example I just thought of?

Sure.

If you own a vacation house that may be partially used by you, partially rented, oftentimes your accountant wants to know how many days you use the place for your own personal use, how many days did you use it to invest in that second house by upgrading it and then the investment aspects, and how many days was it rented?

Yes.

Having a calendaring system that documents your own use versus rental use is a huge thing that accountants want to know to file your taxes.

Yeah. And it's easier to keep it in one central system that isn't involved in your work calendar so that all things home can be in one thing and one system and one platform to help them better manage Everything about the home. Yeah, correct. I totally agree. Totally agree. So we talked about what types of things could be on a calendar for the home. We talked about the hidden cost. We talked about the benefits. Yep. And is there anything else you have to say about calendaring systems?

I do.

Okay, of course he does.

Okay, so Well, it's a two— it's two parts. One is we've talked about, as it relates to maintenance, a lot of the preventative stuff, but calendaring this stuff when you do need fix-it tasks.

Oh yeah.

You need to, you need to, you know, have somebody prune your trees or you need to have somebody else to come fix something that's broken. So A, managing that, but more importantly, the second part of that is when you mark those tasks as being complete, With some cost associated with it. Now, a calendaring system that works in conjunction with a reporting system. Now you can look backwards and say, how much did I spend on my fix-it-and-repair costs this past year? And in which month did I spend more? In spring and fall?

Yep.

And imagine most people live in their home more than 1 year. You did this for 2 to 3 to 4 years. Now, what if you could get a history by year?

Yeah.

Because you're documenting those things. So it's not only the forward-looking prevents something, but it's the backward-looking of, is it costing me more to maintain my home as my home gets older? And what am I spending on an annual basis? It's very easy once you calendar all of these tasks to mark them as complete because then your calendaring system knows what year and what month you actually did them and how much they cost.

Yeah. And that actually leads to a couple things. One, it's forward-looking overview of where you may spend on maintenance and the types of tasks. 2, determining whether if you're repairing the same thing over and over again, it may be time to replace it.

Yes.

So now you've got to replace the project. So it's forward-thinking, allowing you to build up savings for that particular project, whatever it is. Maybe you're trying to replace just a hot water heater, or maybe you have to say, you know what, I want a whole kitchen remodel. That's— I'm going to do that now. And those are 2 very extremely different type of price projects, but both are relevant to how you move forward with your house. And then 3, whether you're not— whether or not you're ready to sell, because maybe You don't want to take on this responsibility, but you know somebody else does. And that's kind of creating that stewardship of the property that you have for the next homeowner.

Correct.

Yeah, that's true. That's really, really true. Oh my gosh, calendaring actually helps with so many things if you haven't already understood from everything we've said.

And I mean, we oftentimes use this phrase, homeownership is either a— it's the continuous journey. Or it's the life cycle of homeownership. Well, if it's a continuous journey and it's a life cycle, knowing when you need to do things in the future and documenting when you've done things so that you can analyze them in the past, that calendaring system becomes hugely important in order to become a smarter homeowner.

That's true. So we're going to close it out with that. So, um, thank you so much for being here with us on Be a Smarter Homeowner podcast. By all means, if you Know somebody who needs to hear this message. Please share it with them. Like and subscribe. We always invite you to do that. And then by all means, tell us what kinds of conversations you want us to have about homeownership and all things home. We're open to those discussions. And for everyone else, have a wonderful day. Thank you so much for being here with us.

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