How to Manage Detailed Home Finances with HomeZada

Hi everyone! Beth Dodson here with HomeZada, and I have some fantastic news for everybody, so I wanna tell you a little bit about that. But before we get started, I wanna say thank you. Thank you for coming to hang out with me today, if you're doing this live, and if you're returning back and watching this after the fact, absolutely thank you for taking the time to watch this video. But I really do have some really great news, so I wanna make sure I deliver that information to you. Um, HomeZada has been busy. The team has been busy over here. We've been building a lot, and I apologize, I'm gonna look away quite a bit because I need to look at my notes to make sure I'm getting you everything that, um, you need to hear about. And, um, we continue to make managing the home better for everybody, and we've listened to our clients, we've listened to the marketplace, and Basically, we've decided to come out with some new features, or a new added app to the existing HomeZada application, and those are involving home finances. And you may be asking, for those of you who are users, you already have some home finances in there. You are correct. However, we believe that the home is your largest asset, and generally, it's also one of your largest expenses. So, we want to help homeowners make sure they can manage all of the details in one complete application, and they can make the best decisions possible for their family and their home. So, what we did was we came out with these financial features, and I'm going to look at them because there's a lot to them, and I'm super excited. So, the first thing we started looking at is home valuations. A lot of people want to know what the value of their house is. They need to know that, and they want to know that for a variety of reasons. One, because they want to know what their asset is worth. And two, they want to know over what period of time will my asset increase or decrease in value. And that leads into, am I ready to sell my house? Should I wait to sell it? Should I sell it sooner? What Homesata has done is it's taken in information to give you a complete valuation of your home, a current one, and then also a 3-year forecasted valuation, so that you can start planning accordingly when you're ready to sell your house, or when you're ready to make some other kind of move with your house. But at least you have visibility into determining this information. The second thing we did is tracking mortgage payments. So, I don't know about anybody else on the phone, I am like, one of these people that gets super excited when I see my mortgage go down. I physically see my statement and it goes down. What Halmzahd has done is we've taken information about your mortgage, and we can now show you graphically what your mortgage, what your balance, excuse me, I can't even speak today, when your mortgage will be paid for. And so you can actually see a graphical representation as if you pay your mortgage with your existing interest rate, so your mortgage loan and your existing interest rate, with your monthly payment, you will know exactly when it gets paid. And I just am super excited about that. I mean, that, for me, that's just exciting. And I know it's a long time for me to get my mortgage paid, but what I love about this is it gives me the opportunity to look at more options on what I wanna do with my mortgage. And so, let's say I look at my mortgage in a graphical formation, And it's gonna take 30 years to pay off. Well, I start looking and saying, if I take one more payment a year, and I place it on the mortgage, that will actually reduce the principal, which will then reduce the interest. Which, interest on mortgages can be a lot. Then I can actually pay less interest on my mortgage in the end, after it's all done and said. And I can also, shorten my span to when my mortgage will get paid. And sometimes this is a full payment, sometimes it's just a couple hundred dollars or whatever, a small portion of your mortgage that you can start paying things down. Or it could be that you look at your mortgage and you say, you know what, I think I can qualify for a refinance and I want to shorten my entire mortgage process so I'm not in a 30-year loan anymore. I want to move to a 15-year fixed. So, you have the opportunity to do that by seeing this graphical representation of your mortgage. I get excited by that. The other thing that we did was, so we've got mortgage, we've got home valuations. Mm-hmm. We also have, excuse me, my little phone keeps sliding. We also have details about your home equity. So, when you know what your mortgage is and you know what the valuation of your house is, Then you know what the difference is, which is the equity you have built into your house. And because you've built equity into your house, this is what is your asset. This is what is part of your net worth, which is exciting for a lot of people. I mean, it's just, this is a lot. Houses are, are just valuable. And why don't we want to know what that is? When you can know what your home equity is, here's the other value it brings to the table. Part of that value is that you have the ability to determine when you want to get a loan for more projects. A lot of people live in their houses for a significant period of time, and after a period of time, they want to actually update it, or they want to remodel some things. Some projects are very expensive. They want to be able to add these projects or modify their house accordingly. Sometimes their family's growing, and they need to add more space for their family, so they need to add more rooms. So they can actually look at the equity and determine whether they wanna take a home equity line or a renovation loan to apply to their home and actually build these projects out. So additions, updates and upgrades, even adding new projects like pools. Some people may want a pool, etc. So they can do that. The other thing that many people don't realize that you can use equity for in your house is you can actually use it to pay down medical bills, to pay down debt that you've incurred maybe somewhere else on a credit card. You can also use it to pay for college tuitions, 'cause sometimes a lot of people have a lot of equity in their home, and then they wanna help their children out with college, and how can they do that? So, one way to do that is by leveraging some of the equity that you've built up into your house. All of this is important to know, not only for your net worth, but also how much equity you have if you need it for some other source of income somewhere else, or you need it, or you want to take a look at how I can actually use it maybe to buy another home. I wanna buy a vacation home. So, you definitely need to talk to a loan officer for all these different things to verify what you can get done, but, These are all different areas of tracking the finances of your home. Once we've done the mortgage, the equity, the valuations, you can also track the insurance. So there's a place in the finances section where you have insurance. And you can add the information about your insurance policy. And what we mean by that is know what your carrier is covering you for in terms of the structure of the house and also the contents. Of the house. This is really important because our solution, if you've decided to perform your home inventory inside HomeZada, you can now track your home inventory content values, if you happen to know them, against your coverage for your contents inside your home that your insurance company has provided you. This is just amazing. It's just so exciting. And the reason why this is exciting is because it helps you be better prepared. If something were to happen to your house, would you have enough coverage on your insurance to cover the things that are the most important to you? If you do not, then you can go back to your insurance agent and say, I need to take a look at some things. I don't know if I have enough coverage. Let's take a look at what my home inventory is. You can actually even share them a PDF of your home inventory inside HomeZada. You can review it together and go forward with that. This is actually a practice I did with my own insurance agent because I realized that there were some things in my house that required special riders. And this is things like jewelry or artwork, or maybe you have collections or something to that effect. But getting in front of your insurance agent and helping them help you is what's really valuable. So now you can actually see whether you're fully covered because you actually have that graphical representation as well. The other thing that we track in home finances is expenses. So many people who are customers of ours have heard me say this before, but in 2015, a Consumer Report indicated that we spend 31% of our annual income on our homes. Whether it's mortgage, whether it's property taxes, whether that's maintenance, whether it's projects, whether it's our utility bills, etc. 31% of our entire income. And in some cases, with some homeowners, that's even more. Maybe they're going through projects, maybe they're changing things up. But this is really, really important because if you have the ability to track all your expenses that are directly related to your home, then you have the ability to make sure you know exactly what it's costing you. Manage your home, and I know I don't know about the rest of you, but I have to go to like five different places, maybe even fifteen. I've got a mortgage statement over here. I've got an insurance bill over here. I've got financial information that I set my bills, whether they'll come in or whether I'm using my. My checking account to actually get information out. So I'm constantly managing a multitude of data points, and to me that's just frustrating. If my house cost me 31% annually to manage, then shouldn't I have that data in one central location so that I can manage it the best way that I need to for myself personally? And I just believe that, and I think. There's a lot of other homeowners out there that believe the same thing. I know a lot of our customers believe that, so we wanna be able to give homeowners the ability to manage all of this data in the palm of their hand, so they can see everything on their mobile phone, they can see everything in one central location, they have one login, easy peasy, making it simple. And so, we wanna empower those homeowners. So, that's kind of what we have for this new release. We— this is for our users of HomeZada, mostly our homeowners. However, we have not forgotten about our professionals. So, I want to make sure I actually address our professionals on this call too. And thank you, homeowners, for bearing with me. Our professionals have the ability to give the gift or enter in data on behalf of the client to help the client manage one of their largest assets, which is their home. And we have a lot of different professionals working with us. Everything from a real estate agent to a real estate company to an insurance agent or company to a home inventory professional, a professional organizer, an estate planner, an estate attorney, a financial planner. Media companies are working with us, other technology companies are working with us, mortgage brokers are working with us. Maintenance contractors, home builders, remodeling contractors. The list is really big about the multi-dimensional pros that actually work with HomeZada. But there's a common thread that they all work with when they are dealing with HomeZada. And what they're doing is they wanna actually give a digital account of some component of their relationship with a customer in the home so that that homeowner can then take on their HomeZada account and manage that information, moving forward. And for instance, if you think about certain companies or agents that give gifts of HomeZada, this is very common. We have many real estate agents that give gifts of HomeZada, and they have their branding inside there so that their customer knows who sent this gift. And I think that's important for everybody. If the customer needs to reach that professional, they can do that simply by seeing their information inside the system of HomeZada. Or they can actually remember who sent that to them and become better, smarter homeowners, which is super exciting. Who wouldn't? Who doesn't want to be a smarter homeowner? So what happens is, for the pros, they also get to give this same financial feature set to their customers. And what that means is they get to give the ability for evaluation, a 3-year forecast evaluation, any insurance information in comparison to their customers so that their customers can actually have more data about their house in order to better manage it. And it just makes it a win-win situation for everybody, giving customers the ability to be the smartest they can when it comes to managing their home is what we all want to do, because a home is seriously complicated to manage. There's a lot of little details here and there. How can we help homeowners empower themselves to make the best decisions? So we can all do that. Our professionals have the ability to give this gift of HomeZada, enter in information, actually include these valuations as well for the customer. So that adds more value-add to the customer. And the customers now have rich intelligent data in a system that can help them manage the future of not only their home, but their time and their money, which is always important. So that's kind of where we are with HomeZada Professional— excuse me, HomeZada— and the new feature sets that we've rolled out. And this is how the pros can use it and also how the consumers can use it. And it's so exciting that we can continually give to our customers some great solutions to help them be as smart as they can on managing their home, because giving people the power to know what they have and how they can manage it is all we've ever wanted and all we care about. So let us know if you have any questions. Let us know if you have any comments. Send us your feedback. Please put it in the comments section. If you like this video, please share it, like it, just let us know. And if there's specific information that you have either about this section or HomeZada or our company or anything else in managing the home, please tell us in the comments and we will be sure to respond back to you or we will be able to create videos for you that address some of the questions that you have. So I look forward to talking to you guys soon again. I don't know what it's gonna be about just yet. If you want something specific, let me know and I will get working on it. But I hope you find these features extremely valuable, and we look forward to all your comments. Have a great, great day, and see you soon.