Ep 058 - How HomeZada Helps Homeowners Plan Before Things Break

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, and welcome to another episode of Be a Smarter Homeowner podcast. I'm here with John Bedrosik, my other co-host, and Today we're going to talk about something most people don't know, and the fact is most homeowners don't plan for the biggest cost of owning a home until it's too late. HomeZada now gives homeowners a clear property-specific forecast of future replacement costs so they can plan ahead instead of react. No more surprises. John, I can't wait to talk about this subject because I know you and the team have been working really hard to get this out there. And this is something that literally makes planning projects in a house more efficient, more responsible too.

Yeah, I'm super excited about it. I mean, you know, I've been a homeowner for 25 years, I consider myself reasonably experienced. Intuitively, I know some of these things, but most experienced homeowners don't even sort of have a system in place to actually see this level of information. And to use it to make better financial planning decisions around this, around your house. So I'm super excited to talk about it because I think this is valuable for the experienced homeowner and valuable for the first-time homeowner and everybody in between.

So since we're talking about this, and most homeowners are not always expecting equipment and appliances to fail or break in their home or roofs to leak or what have you, because They're not thinking about that. They're thinking about, oh, I get to have my family in this home. I get to build this glorious, joyful experience. I get to throw parties. They're not thinking about replacement cost. They're not thinking about an HVAC piece of equipment, 'cause actually, who really wants to think about that? Let's face it, nobody really wants to. They don't wanna think about replacing their roof. They wanna think about, you know, painting their walls this beautiful color, changing out their— Cabinets in their kitchen, adding a new sofa, which is so glorious. But let's face it, these elements of our home help our home operate properly. And so we need to think about those. We do not need surprises when it comes to this. So just from a, a perspective, why do you think people don't plan for these types of scenarios and these types of replacements?

Yeah, great question. I'll answer it 2 ways. One is when we refer to major replacement costs or major assets, what are we actually talking about? And you hit the nail on the head. You sort of already articulated that, which is it's a lot of the building materials, equipment, and systems that provide you the modern conveniences of living in a home. You've got a roof over your head, you can get heating and cooling, you get hot water, You have windows that bring in fresh air and the siding. All of those things are the major building materials and equipment that essentially come together that create a great living experience for most homeowners. The challenge that pretty much every homeowner faces is all of those things have what's called a useful life. Even if you're super diligent about maintaining these things, Yeah. The roofs will eventually wear out after 20 or 30 years. The HVAC may wear out after, let's say, 8 to 20 years, depending on what state you live in. I can't wait for it. And so as a result of these things wearing out, it— these things are the things that catch most homeowners off guard because we live in our houses. And you're absolutely right, we're like, come home, Enjoy our family and friends and throw parties and, and, you know, conduct our life. And we sort of forget about turning on that hot water, and the hot water just comes out. And we forget that you can just push the button and lower or raise the temperature with your HVAC. And, you know, a big rainstorm comes and you're dry and nothing's— no problem. So it's sort of like, because we forget about all those conveniences, Most homeowners, even the experienced ones, they just sort of ignore those things because it's top of mind. We take them for granted, so to speak.

Yeah. And so, you're basically saying too, not only is it top of mind, but people are really busy with their lives and they're assuming that everything's always going to work.

100%. And it gets back into the— even when they think about their home, right? You might Let's say, here's an example. You bought a house that's 20 years old. You're living in it and you're walking in and out of that kitchen every day and you're like, God, we need to remodel that kitchen. It's top of mind. You see it all the time, but you're not actually thinking about, hang on, my house is 20 years old. How long are my HVAC units going to last?

Yeah.

How long is my roof going to last? Do I need to change my hot water heater? Because those things you're sort of taking for granted because you turn on the hot water, the hot water comes out.

Comes out.

air conditioning goes on and off. So, it's those things, again, you take for granted. And all those other projects take the priority because you see them every day. Oh, you see that carpet? I really want hardwood floors over there.

Yeah.

I really want to remodel this room because you see it. It's part of your lifestyle. It's these systems and assets of your house that you take for granted because that's essentially what creates the creature comfort of modern life in America is home and having the ability to control temperature and water and shelter.

So, I innately know, but I just want to hear your take on this, is when someone doesn't plan for these projects, what's the impact to the homeowner, both financially and from any other perspective? I The first thing I can say is all those conveniences that you just talked about went out the door.

Yeah. I mean, you bring up a great point and I have to address it in 2 different segments. A, how do they figure this thing out? Usually, they figure it out in what they would perceive as a crisis situation of like, I've got to go to my business meeting. I'm taking a shower and there's no hot water.

Yeah.

All of a sudden, crisis. Like, what? How do I deal with that? Or it's in the middle of the summer, people are coming over for a party, you turn on the air conditioning and it doesn't work. Or it's in the middle of a massive rainstorm and all of a sudden you look up and you start seeing some leaks coming through your ceiling. So, it's usually, it's a bad sign when the hot water doesn't come out, the hot water doesn't come out, or it gets hot or some other sort of damage. Or your garage door doesn't open. You're pushing that button, all of a sudden the garage door doesn't open. You're like, how am I going to get out of my garage? I got to go to my meeting. I got to go pick up my kids. You're laughing because you know that happened to you.

Correct. And it's like, I forgot actually that you could still open your garage, but you got to disassemble things. Yes. So, yes.

You got to unhook it from the garage door. You got to manually push it open.

The conveniences are gone. And then, of course, surprise, it needs to get replaced. There's some financial implication there.

Yes. And this gets into part 2, the financial implication. I'll wait 1 second to get into the cost of these things, but the need to replace is almost immediate.

Yeah.

You've lived without your— well, you've lived without your kitchen remodel for going on a year or 2 now, meaning you bought the house new and you were going to do it.

Huh? 10 years, maybe.

Yeah, you've lived with it. But now, all of a sudden, you have no hot water. You're not gonna wait a year and live in your house without hot water. You're not gonna wait, you know, even a week without trying to fix your HVAC unit. If suddenly you realize your roof has got a massive leak and that's causing all kinds of other problems, you're not gonna wait a year. So the immediacy and the urgency of fixing these things, because they're those modern conveniences that we've taken, for example, You're like, nope, this is getting fixed right now. And this is where the financial pain sets in. Some of these things are very large ticket items if you have to replace them.

Like a roof.

Like a roof is a huge ticket item. That's probably one of the things that we talked about prior to setting up this show is like, what are the biggest expenses that people get surprised on? It's 1A and 1B is the roof and the HVAC system.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, probably the biggest surprises.

Biggest surprises and—

Biggest expenses.

And biggest expenses. Now, there are other surprises like my garage door example, because most people don't even understand that your garage door has springs, and those springs are rated over how many times they're typically going to be useful in opening and closing your door. Yes, if they break, about $400 to $500 maybe to fix them. So it's It's oftentimes unexpected. There's nothing really you can do to kind of mitigate it other than be aware of it. But the roof and the HVAC systems are usually the bigger ticket items. And you can imagine now also that scales with a larger size house.

Yeah.

If you have a 2,000 square foot house, you know, normal roof, usually one HVAC system. You start to get into a 2,800, 3,000, 3,500 square foot home. Obviously, the roof is bigger because the square footage is bigger.

Yeah.

Or that's a single story. You got a large roof. Even if it's a 2-story, maybe the roof footprint is not as big as a 1-story, but the cost is higher because you got labor to go up on 2 floors. But now you have 2 HVAC systems. Some houses have 3 HVAC systems. Really large houses even have 4. So that is the biggest issue, is it's the— we take it for granted. When it breaks, we're like, oh, I can't live like this. It's an immediacy thing. And then the financial costs for some of these items are really large-ticket items, which creates the downstream financial stress of, I haven't actually planned for this expense.

So, so let's talk about What homeowners currently do or did before we came up with this new component with inside HomeZada, and then let's talk about how we're filling it. So what did homeowners do before? I can attest for myself that things unfortunately by happenstance happened, which is why we're here. building out this platform so we can be prepared and not— oops, there's a surprise— um, get surprised by certain elements. And it's being more prepared has helped me manage and mitigate these risks of things breaking, which has been amazing. But what did people do before? They just wait till things break?

So, I kind of put this maybe into 2 buckets of an answer.

20% of the homeowners— I like the 2 buckets, you notice? Keep going. I'm just picking you up.

Because I'm trying to summarize what's going on in the mind of 100 million homeowners. It's pretty hard to do.

Totally. That's a lot. Yeah.

So, let's just say 20% of the homeowners are really smart about their home, and they intuitively know That how long they've been in their house, when their house was built, and they know that these things will need to be replaced. But their challenge is, even though they intuitively know it, when you say, how did they do it before? It was locked in here.

In their brain.

It's in their brain. They never bothered to even put it down somewhere. Now, maybe there's 1% or 2% that created their own little spreadsheet and sort of have that, but that's few and far between. If you walk up to somebody who's like a serious homeowner, owned their house for 30 years, you're like, hey, how old's your roof and when do you think you're going to need to replace it? They might know the answer to that, but it's sort of locked in their head. And that's essentially how they've been tracking it because they're that of a passionate homeowner. They realize these things.

Yeah.

Unfortunately, the other 80% of homeowners in America, not even thinking about it.

So they're reacting.

Therefore, it's not even in their head. Therefore, if it's not in their head, it's certainly not in any system, and it's not anywhere else. And so they get surprised. However, I, I will also state one thing that I think is a big misnomer, because a lot of times this starts when people buy a house.

Oh, okay.

When they buy a house, most people will get an inspection.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

The inspections are great, don't get me wrong. The inspection industry can do a fantastic job for the industry because it's basically sending out somebody that's going to evaluate an asset that you're about to spend big money on and kind of go through and walk you through it and basically tells you what's either A, broken and needs to be fixed, or what's Cosmetic, but might need to be fixed.

Correct.

But that inspection is not— usually does not give you an inventory of all these major assets, and it doesn't give you a forecast of how long it might last and how much it might cost to replace it. Yeah, that's correct. And don't— and this gets into what I think every homeowner in America faces, which is They, they, you ask them that question. Well, I got a home inspection report. The roof wasn't on it. Well, yeah, the roof might've been in great condition when you bought it. And when you bought it, it was 20 years old. But the roof that was put on when your house was built had a warranty of about 25 years. So again, who knows whether it was maintained, the weather conditions, this, that, and the other. There's all kinds of variabilities here, but you might actually, if you live in the house for 10 years, you might have to replace that roof in 7 years. Inspection report is not going to give you that forecast.

Correct.

And so back to your question, 80% of the homeowners in America are not even thinking about these things.

Yeah, good point.

Even at the time of sale.

Yeah, good point. They're, they're realizing how they want their home to operate for them— parties, joy, families, etc.— and not realizing that the modern conveniences are affected by the actual structure, equipment, appliances of the home. And without something working properly, it will impact your lifestyle.

Yes. And it just goes back to the nobody's really thinking about these things. And that's— I think you even told me a story recently of somebody you met when you were out and about talking, which is When these things happen, they're surprises, they're expensive, and they have to be fixed right away.

Yes. And if you don't have— go ahead.

The combination of being surprised, having to be fixed right away, and expensive is what causes angst, stress for those homeowners. My hot water heater's been out. I've had to live 3 days without it. I couldn't get a plumber. It's hot and sweltering and my AC doesn't work.

Yes. And unfortunately, for whatever reason, a lot of these pieces of equipment, when you are not prepared, break in prime usage season. And one, to your point, good luck finding a contractor because they're busy servicing all the other people that need the same thing that you need. 'Cause nobody prepared. And 2, it's peak season, so all those contractors get to do an upcharge.

Yes.

Rather than actually replacing, let's say, HVAC equipment off-season or in between seasons that you can get it installed for a much lower rate. It's like the whole element is it's super expensive. And it creates a lot of angst and frustration and disappointment. And I wanted to use my money for this HVAC. I keep bringing up HVAC, HVAC equipment on my vacation, and now I can't use it anymore.

Exactly. Because number one, they either A, don't have the savings, which now means they're going to have to figure out how to go in debt to pay for this thing.

Yeah.

Or they do have the savings, but the savings was allocated for something else.

Something else.

That creates the downstream stress. So all of this is why I personally am so excited, because as you know, our mission, which is the name of our podcast, we want every homeowner to be smarter about their home.

Totally. Totally. Yeah. Arm them with as much information as they can so they can make the best decisions for their specific home and their specific family and lifestyle.

Correct. And so, you know, we want to create that instant visibility so that people can start thinking about these things. Because if you're not thinking about them, 2 to 3 years from now, one day, you know, your HVAC may go out because you weren't sort of tracking it and sort of preparing for yourself. There's a whole bunch of— we can go into the sort of laundry list if you want over all the different things that could break in this major asset kind of forecasting that we do. But it's so important, which is why we're so excited about, and the feedback that we've gotten even from customers to date about how valuable it is.

So basically, we're helping homeowners prepare and get ahead of all these situations.

I mean, it's financial planning, and it's financial planning around that investment in your house. And we can get into the fact that once you, know that investment, well, maybe that actually starts to creep into another criteria over should we sell this house.

Oh yeah, good point. So let's, let's show people because I know you have some things you want to show people. I kind of want to show people. So I want to explain how this works. I want you to explain how this works. I want you to show people. For people who are listening, come back to the video at this time and you can see how this functionality works and explain a little bit about the details of it.

Oh, okay, perfect. So this is a visual demonstration for our audio listeners. We've got a picture of a 2-story house in graphic form. It's got some of the exterior walls removed so you can see what's going on on the inside of the house. And it goes back to what I've said in many different podcasts. Your home is a collection of building materials, equipment, and appliances and fixtures that all get put together and assembled together, and we call it a house or a home.

Yep.

And so—

A living home.

Looking at this, looking at this picture, you have a roof, you have windows, you have siding, you have a hot water heater, you have HVAC equipment, you have appliances. These are all the combination of these building materials and equipment that come together to create your house. Now, again, when was your house built?

Mm-hmm.

When it was built is when all those materials got put in and somebody made that selection. May have been a home builder, it may have been the owner if it was a custom-built home. Somebody made the decision over what products to actually build your house with. And every one of those products had a building manufacturer. And every one of those building manufacturers probably said, you know what? The average life of my siding is 30 years.

Yeah.

The average life of my roof is 20 years. The average life of whatever is 15 years. And so essentially, when you look at a home, whether it's you walking outside of your own home or whether you're in the market to buy in that new home, you're like, I want you to sort of put the lens on. Yes, we look at the lens over how does the rooms look and where's Johnny's room gonna be? and how am I going to sort of cook and clean and entertain? But I also want people to kind of look at their house through the lens of all of these materials and equipment and assets.

Yeah.

And then think about these as kind of like individual pop-ups over like, huh, this might only be 10 years left. This might be 2 years left. This might be 5 years left. And so, all of those different dynamics kind of give you a sense over when you might need to replace those things out in a future year in a forecast. As well as approximately how much do those things cost to replace?

Yeah, this is, this is really smart because it, it takes everything out of the brain that you may or may not know about your home and then puts it in a system to help you manage it so that you don't forget about things year over year.

Yeah, correct. This goes back to when you asked me the question, how do people currently do it? Remember I said that 20% of homeowners, where it's locked in their brain?

Yeah.

They walk around their house and that data is sort of locked in their brain, but it's sort of a guess because they know that they're going to need to do it. The other 80% of homeowners, they look at their house and they don't even see their house through this lens.

Yeah, because I can see that because a lot of homeowners The majority of them don't move into a net new, brand new home. They actually move into a home that was pre-owned by somebody else. And so they may not have all of that information or that specific, well, this is when it was built and these are brand new appliances and/or equipment, or it was replaced, but which ones were and which ones weren't and how do we actually manage it all?

It becomes very confusing. That is a huge thing, meaning your house may be Built 40 years ago.

Yeah.

And it may have had 3 homeowners during those 40 years, but somebody has replaced some of these things along the way. And that's where even in the real estate space, a lot of this stuff is not really known. Yeah.

Yeah.

Because the previous homeowner replaced the HVAC unit and the current homeowner doesn't know when.

Yeah. Or they didn't have a record of it.

Or they didn't have a record of it. We can get it. We're going to get into sort of another aspect of the sort of feature because The first and foremost thing here is you need to have a data structure that structures all this information first, then it can forecast it, and then it can create an estimated value so that you can instantly see it.

Perfect.

And that's essentially what I'm showing you here in this screen. Whoops, didn't want to do that. I want to— Click on that so you can see it. So how does it work in HomeZada? Let me refresh this and make sure I didn't time out on me. Perfect. Okay. Look at that. So you see a report that's on screen. We call it asset replacement by year for our audio listeners. And essentially what you see is a bar chart that on the bottom, on the x-axis, shows you future years, 2027. You can see it even skips years, '29, '30, '31, '33. It shows you future years. And on the y-axis, it kind of gives you a summary over how much you might have to budget for to spend on replacing those things. So, this goes back to what your big thing is, Elizabeth. You don't want to be surprised by these big expenses.

No.

You want to know. Now, it may be a year or two off, right? There's a lot of variability here, but nobody in my mind, has this view at the top of their fingertips in the United States or anywhere as it relates to homeowners.

Now we do.

Now you do. And now the benefit of how Homes Auto works is below that you can see a table and you can then click on the year 2027. And you click on that and now it starts to show you in a list. And it goes back to those 2 things. Remember those garage door springs?

Oh, yeah.

Again, your garage door springs are rated over how many times they're going to work based on how many times you're going to open and close your garage door.

Yeah.

Well, if you're in and out all the time, 5 times a day, your garage door springs are going to wear out longer than if you do them less. But it now gives you at least a forecast. And by the way, you have 2 garage doors, so you have 2 sets of springs, one for each door. And you also may have to replace your hot water heater.

Yes. So, so yes, that is critical because I don't like when those doors come crashing down because that's happened to me before.

Yes.

Prior to HomeZada, by the way.

And now you can kind of come back here and look at some of these other things. Now you can look at a future year like 2033. Why is this $44,000? It's significantly higher. It's the biggest. Well, you click on that and you're like, oh, I might actually need to paint the outside of my house. We haven't even— we talk about materials and systems, but a lot of the preservation of the outside of your siding has to do with, are you painting your house?

Yes.

Right. So how much does it cost to paint the outside of your house? A lot of homes have fences. Those fences could be either iron or wood. A lot of times they wear out and you need to replace your fence.

Yeah.

The biggest one here is roofing material.

Ugh, roofs.

Right? And so, again, if I put myself in the mind of a homeowner and like, okay, it's 2026, this system is saying, hey, I might only have, what is that, about 7 years left on these things. I can either, A, start to plan for this because, hey, we as a family, we're going to live in this house for the next 15 to 20 years because we love it here. Or you now use that as a criteria of, we love it here, but do we really want to spend that? Do we like the house enough to have to make that investment 5 to 7 years from now?

Yeah.

Maybe you don't have to answer that question now. Maybe you answer it in 2 or 3 years, but maybe 3 years into it, you're like, yeah, no, I don't really want to, you know, let's sell this house and buy another house in the same neighborhood because we like it here and let the next homeowner deal with sort of these replacement things. It becomes, again, you have to see this level of data to be able to make those both financial planning over socking money away for this, as well as other decision-making over whether you're going to stay in this house or not.

Yeah. And I see this as another financial planning, I guess, trade-offs. We've talked about that. Understanding this complexity of managing a house and simplifying it like we see here in this report helps us understand How to prioritize our finances for these projects, but also whether we want to take certain trips, spend money on certain vehicles. Also whether we need to save for medical or health or healthcare type things, or even college for kids or what have you, and/or other remodeling projects. So All of a sudden, this brings financial awareness to all aspects of life because now we've got trade-offs and we've got decision-making we need to make.

Without a doubt. I mean, it's 100% agreed because those examples that we talked about, which is, oh, darn, I have to spend money on this thing that I didn't plan for. is taking away from something else in your life that you wanted to allocate it for it. But one point that I wanted to get to before I show one other thing is explain to people how this actually works in Homes Auto, because I think that's hugely important. A lot of people will look at this chart and go, oh wow, I need to create all that data. I don't want to do that. It's just too much work. I'll just deal with it later. No, Homes Auto does this for you at signup automatically.

Brilliant.

You do nothing.

But sign up.

But sign up. Well, sign up and you have to give us your address.

Okay.

Because— but most people do because they're managing their house. And so essentially, real quickly over how this works, you sign up, you give us your address because we know it's 123 Main Street in, you know, Springfield, Illinois, based on county records or MLS data. We'll probably have an idea over when the house was built.

Yes.

And we also know the square footage of your house. So, now, we're estimating how many garage doors you have, how many HVAC units you have, the age of your house. Then, we also know the location of your house. So, at signup, our AI tool is basically crunching all of that data, and in about 10 seconds, it produces all of that data. and estimates, A, how long these things are going to last. It picks the year that it thinks you're going to need to replace it, and it creates the estimate. And then all you have to do is come to the page that I'm showing here, and you see it instantly on screen.

So what you're saying is this is actually personalized for each specific property?

Yes, at signup. Again, I'll give you the different example. 456 Cherokee Road in Seattle is a 4,000-square-foot home that's 10 years old. And somebody else is in 1444 in St. Petersburg Court in Plano, Texas.

Right.

And it's a 2,000-square-foot home and it's 25 years old. The system automatically crunches all that data and creates a unique asset replacement forecast for that home in that location Based on your size and age of your home. And you, the homeowner, have done zero work and you get this visibility.

This is incredible. This is a great functionality/feature. This is incredible. Yeah.

Now, one other thing before we—

More surprises! Say bye to surprises!

Say bye to surprises. Yes. So it goes back to the—

there's—

I want to show one other thing real quick, but I sort of need to lay the background of it. What's critical here is how you asked that question before, like, how is it done before? Well, 20%, it's in the head, the other 80%, nobody has it. So, what Homesada has done with no work is created the structure of the data. It's now a forecastable set of assets because it knows you have HVAC and siding and paint and all these other things like you've seen.

Yeah.

Therefore, the structure of the data and AI knows that roofs tend to last let's say 25 years or 30 years, or HVAC units in Arizona are going to last 8 years versus HVAC units in, you know, Denver, Colorado may last longer because it doesn't get as hot and humid kind of mentality.

Right.

So it's predicting all of those things. The next question that a lot of customers would then ask is, well, well, how accurate is it? Well, it's pretty darn what I call directionally accurate, but it allows you to make it more accurate even in a more simpler way. And the answer to that question is, if I click on this, like 2040, then you go into— I look at air conditioning unit 2 and look at what every homeowner can do is go out and take pictures of their HVAC unit.

Oh, yeah.

And their roof and their hot water heater. And then as long as you've done those pictures, you process the individual barcode of your HVAC unit And then you see down here, it automatically says, oh, this was replaced in 2024, 2 years ago. Therefore, the replacement date is now 2040. So your photos of the specific assets can update, and then it becomes much more accurate because you're the one— that's all you have to do is go out and take, let's just say, 20 photos of the 20 major things that need to be replaced. Process that through AI, and you're going to get a much more accurate forecast than us right out of the box.

Oh my gosh, that's fantastic!

So that's why I'm so excited about this because this is so valuable to pretty much every homeowner.

So it also does like. To your point, it helps people decide whether or not they want to stay in their home or sell it. Like, I don't want to incur these costs, so they may say no, it's time to move, and they allow someone else to incur the cost when they leave, which is to each their own. Whoever, whatever people want to do. But that also affects— having this awareness affects whether or not you want to sell your home and stay in your home.

I personally believe it will. The more people start to use this, it's going to cause them to ask questions about their home and future decisions about their home that many people are not even thinking about today. Going back to the— most people are surprised when their hot water stops working. And the HVAC stops working. So if they're surprised by the usage pattern, they're definitely not thinking about that as it relates to, hey, should we live in this house for the next 5 to 10 years, or should we sell it? Again, I'm not saying that's the sole criteria over why people decide to buy and sell and move. Most of it has to do with, I got a job and I have to relocate, or I've always wanted to move here.

Family, I like the neighborhood.

All kinds of criteria about that. I'm just saying This kind of data is one other data point that can be, will be used, I believe, more often to make that kind of lifestyle decision over whether to stay and/or save to make that potential investment. Now, don't get me wrong. I think there's a huge component of what maybe some who may be on our first podcast watching this.

Yeah.

We still have the preventative maintenance piece.

Yes.

That's still important, meaning you can preserve the life of your HVAC unit if you get regular service. You can preserve the life of your roof by making sure that moss isn't growing on it and leaves aren't on it and all these other kinds of things.

Critters. Preser—

preserve—

Critters.

Critters, yes, we do.

Critters. I got critters. I gotta deal with all those critters on my roof.

Beth is referring to specifically about squirrels.

Storing their nuts in my roof.

In our roof where the joints come together. Because it's a clay tile roof. There's like tape and they rip into the tape and they use it to store their nuts.

Not anymore.

Okay.

Well, I don't know.

I lost track of it. Lost train of thought there. But it's the preventative maintenance.

Yeah. It's the—

yes, you need to— hopefully people understand you need to have that forward-looking forecast over when you're going to need to replace it. But if you don't do any preventative maintenance, odds are you're going to have to replace it much sooner than if you are doing preventative maintenance.

Oh, yeah, for sure.

And so, having both of those things, having the preventative maintenance is going to basically push out that replacement date. And candidly, it kind of goes back to if I think about my own financial planning, if I'm planning for having my HVAC replaced in 5 years and I've actually started to set money away, But I'm really good at preventative maintenance and it lasts 2 or 3 years longer than my forecast, then maybe my life's changed and I decide to sell the house. And now, I've saved all this extra money.

Yeah.

That's the flip side that now I can use because I was planning on saving it for replacement stuff. I can use it for that unexpected vacation that I want to take. And then it becomes the opposite of what we've been talking about. Most people are Having to pay for something that they never planned for that's taking away. Now this becomes the reverse.

Yeah, and I will attest, taking care of my equipment and appliances when they eventually do break, which is over 20 years, contractors are amazed at how well I've taken care of them. They're amazed. They're like, you've had this for how long? And they are stunned. And I go, I take care of my equipment. Preventative maintenance is key. But also, to your point, we keep saying this, this is like the ultimate in financial planning as it relates to our largest expense, which is our home, and, and how we can be more proactive long-term. So I, I always like this phrase. I say it all the time. Are you playing the short game or are you playing the long game? I like to play the long game.

Yes.

You know, I play the long game in everything in life.

100%. I think, you know, I guess it sort of dawned on me as, as we were sort of building out this feature set, which is most homeowners just do not have a structured data set around all the different materials and equipment and assets around their house. And because they don't have that data set, They, A, don't want to take the time to create it themselves, therefore it gets ignored. And because they don't take the time to create it themselves, then they don't think about, well, how do I budget for those future replacement costs? How old is my home? Did this thing get replaced in the past?

Yeah.

And all of that leads to the sort of surprise of, oh Lord, I've got to spend, you know, $15,000 on replacing my HVAC unit in the middle of the summertime. And then you talk to that person and they're like, oh man, my home's a money pit. I'm so frustrated. A lot of the frustrations that homeowners face is just that they lack a structured data set of their house. They lack the desire to create it themselves. Therefore, they get—

they don't know where, how to.

Yeah, they don't learn. Yeah, absolutely. Another word, they don't know how to. They don't even think that your garage door has springs. Most people think that the garage door opener, that little chain, is the thing that's actually doing the bulk of the work. It's actually that spring that's above the door.

Yeah.

But again, this goes back into homeownership is like this collection of assets, and nobody really has a good structured data set around it. Nobody is forecasting that, and nobody is really kind of trying to take a proactive approach over trying to inform homeowners of this thing. Which hopefully you can see just my level of excitement, because I find personal enjoyment over trying to make people's lives better. And I personally think that this kind of financial forecasting over your largest assets in the house is a huge, huge saver that every homeowner in America needs.

Oh, I agree with you. So what is it? So what's the first thing or one thing that you think people need to do From this episode?

The first, I guess it would probably be a 2-parter. One is try to determine when your house was built. Yeah, because that's a huge driver. The second thing is see if you can list out all of the major assets, the equipment and building materials. I mean, we've sort of mentioned them all, but you could kind of go through them all and then try to determine whether they've been recently replaced or not. And you could try to do this even in your own Excel spreadsheet. It's not like it's rocket science. That becomes sort of an action step that people could do on their own.

Yeah. And if they don't do this, what are they faced with? I know. Surprises! Costly, costly surprises.

Costly surprises. Yes. I was trying to find the right word, but you beat me to it. But yes.

Costly surprises.

Costly surprises.

I like fun surprises, not costly surprises.

Yeah, I mean, I made this comment to, you know, my parents who are old, in the older generation, and it's like, the homes that we live in today—

It's a state of mind.

The homes that we live in now are better than the homes that kings and queens lived in 100 years ago.

Oh, it's totally—

You have running hot water, you have— you turn on the stove and you have heat, and you have shelter, and you have all the modern conveniences of life. It is an amazing thing of having, you know, your own personal home. I think it's fantastic. But again, all of those modern conveniences get taken for granted.

Yeah, they do. I think, I think you're, you're Correct on that. Like, because it automatically works, people don't think about it until it doesn't automatically work.

Yeah, yeah, you flush the toilet and off it goes.

Oh yes, there it is. So anything else you want to close with?

Um, yeah, I mean, it's just our mission here is we're just trying to create an instant forecastable set of structured data to help you plan the big major replacements in your house.

Yeah, create systems, systems to make everything work. So thank you for this and thank you for sharing this information. I've been really excited to see it and to— I'm excited to use it myself and see how it compares to, you know, my brain that's up there and I'm just really excited that we are able to avoid these costly surprises and we're able to provide people with the data they need for better financial planning. Without question, like, this is amazing. So if you think anyone needs this information, this podcast, please feel free to share it. We want to thank you again for listening, for being with us today. John and I are really excited to always produce these podcasts. We have a lot of guests that we are also hosting on this podcast. If you know somebody who wants to be here, Please introduce them to us. But by all means, share, like, subscribe. We appreciate all of you for being here, and we want to make sure that we continue to educate you on all things home. Thank you for being with us at Be a Smarter Homeowner Podcast, and until then, have a wonderful day.

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