Beth Dodson breaks down the true cost of homeownership beyond mortgage and taxes. Most homeowners should spend 1-4% of their home's value annually on maintenance. HomeZada's platform tracks six expense categories to show how much of your income goes to your house.
Hi everyone, it is Beth Dodson here with HomeZada. Thank you so much for being here. We're going to talk today about total cost of homeownership. What do we often think about when it comes to homeownership? We often think about our mortgages. We may even think about our taxes. We may think about some insurances. We may even think about what utilities we need to run our home, like electric, water. But oftentimes we forget about some other areas of total cost of homeownership. So let's talk about what those areas are and then how you can actually manage them. So the first step is, what is total— where do you find all the data for total cost of homeownership? The first thing is to understand what your expenses are. For instance, your mortgage, your insurances, your taxes, But also your utilities. Also, if you have any service providers that assist you with managing your house, whether it's cleaning support, whether it's pool individuals, maybe you even have some gardeners that help you while you're not around. So all of those service providers also consistently provide you value, and they need to be included in the total cost of homeownership. But what we often forget is, what does it take to remodel my house? We think it's a basis, like a project that we're doing and purely has a project basis, but those projects enhance the value of our homes. So by having those projects identified and the cost managed, you're also managing part of the total cost of your homeownership. And you may have a project a year, or you may have them over time. The second thing we often forget about is what do we annually spend on maintenance? Now there's tips out there to tell you that you need to spend about 1 to 4% of the value of your home based on the age of your home. But if you're tracking the details of your home maintenance and your projects inside your own systems, then you can actually predict how much you're going to spend on maintenance and on your projects moving forward. Okay, so take that into consideration. The total cost of homeownership is our expenses That we normally pay for our homes, our service providers that we talk about, our maintenance schedule, our project schedule, but it's also the contents inside the home. So we often are about— we want to decorate our homes and we are buying items to put in our homes. We are hanging window furnishings from our homes. We are, um, adding light bulbs. Maybe we want to do some colored lights. We are decorating our homes for the holidays. We are adding desks and beds so that we can sleep comfortably and work comfortably in our homes. We are adding pots and pans because maybe we just absolutely love to cook and we want to make sure that we're providing our families with healthy meals. But when you think about these contents, we often forget that they play a role in the total cost of homeownership. If anything were to happen to your home, those contents would need to be documented and recorded to file a claim. So that's yet another item that needs to be considered in the total cost of homeownership. So what did we identify again? Let's go through them. Your monthly annual expenses like mortgages, utilities, taxes, insurance, etc., to manage your home. Your service providers that help you and support you in managing the home— cleaning services, pools, landscaping, etc. Your maintenance aspects, whether you are performing the maintenance yourself or you're working with third parties to do that. Your project budget, and your home inventory contents. All of these items are important to track. Now, how can you actually track it? So this is one of the values that HomeZada brings to the table. You can track all of these items inside HomeZada so that you gain a fuller awareness of all of the different spend that's actually going on in your home. And when you can know what's going on in your home from a spending perspective, you can actually tie that back to your overall budget to understand how much of your income is being spent on your home and how much is being spent in other places. You can also understand if you're spending all this on your home, this income on your home, how much do you need to allocate if you want to take this special vacation or you want to pay for Um, an education, or you have some healthcare expenses. It's all very important to understand the total cost of homeownership as it impacts the rest of your overall budget. So it's really important to understand that. We at Homesava understand that, so we want to help you track all of that. My advice is to make sure you are tracking as much of this information as possible so that you can be the smartest possible homeowner. That you are, that understands all the details about your house, including the entire total cost of homeownership. Thank you so much for being with me. I really appreciate it. If you have any questions, please put them in the comments below and also make sure you check us out at www.homezada.com.
