Sharing your Property Details with Others HomeZada Tip

Hi everyone, Beth Dodson here with HomeZilla. I hope you're having a fabulous day. Today we're going to talk about how you can share information about your home with others, and we'll get into specifically who those others are and why that's important. So specifically within HomeZilla, you have the ability to first Print PDFs of a home inventory. And the reason why printing a PDF of a home inventory or saving a PDF of a home inventory on your computers and sending that off to specific people is important is because if you have a PDF of your home, of your inventory, you can actually send that to your insurance company. And if your insurance company has that PDF, then they can actually make an assessment of the actual information, items, possessions that you own in your home to give you an accurate and actual quote for your insurance to make sure that you are properly covered. This is also important because if you have specific items in your home that are unique and different, whether it's certain collections, whether it's, um, in my case I learned about this, carpets and/or paintings from someone, you want to make sure that they're covered. This is beyond traditional jewelry, it's beyond wine collections, this is a lot of different things. So you want to make sure that you're appropriately covered by your insurance company. So that's a really easy way to send over a PDF, have a conversation with your insurance agent or company, Understand whether you're covered. If you're not, get the appropriate coverage. The other thing you can do within a home inventory is not only send a PDF, but you can also send and print an Excel spreadsheet. So some people need an Excel spreadsheet, then you can send that to your insurance company as well. In fact, this inventory can be sent to family members, whether it's in PDF or whether it's in an Excel spreadsheet, for their record keeping. The other thing that we have within the inventory functionality at HomeZada is an estate planning PDF. Now, there are a couple fields inside HomeZada that enable you to create an estate planning PDF, which means you can identify the individual organization you want these items to go to and any reasons why. And that PDF will be slightly different because it will have the actual possessions of the home It won't have the fixed assets, which are things like doors and carpets and stovetops and refrigerators, possibly refrigerators, sinks, countertops, etc. So this estate planning PDF is very important. One, you can send it to family members for visibility, but most importantly, you can send it to your estate attorney or your state planner. Now here's something to keep in mind: the information in HomeZada is not legally binding. No information is legally binding until you actually attach it to a contract, which is why it's important if you've gone through the process of establishing an inventory, identifying the individuals or organizations that you want to have these items that are valued by you inside HomeZada, print an inventory PDF. You can then send that to your estate attorney or planner, and then they can make that a legally binding document, attach it to their information found within, um, within their trust contracts, wills, power of attorneys, etc., that they have for you. So that's really, really valuable. In fact, many estate attorneys and estate planners I've talked to said this is a godsend. This would make our lives even easier than they already are, but make it really, really easy working with our clients so that they understand if there's prized possessions or something to that effect, or something extremely momentous and valuable, that that individual can get it to the appropriate person. The other thing to keep in mind is when it comes to maintenance and it comes to projects, you can actually print screens of maintenance tasks and project lists, and that you can share with A maintenance contractor, a family member, yourself. You can set it out if you are a paper person that likes to check off a to-do list. You can actually put that aside somewhere where you're going to see it for the weekend so you can get those chores done, and then also providing that to any contractors that you're working with to help them identify how you can best work together. And this information is very important because you've been planning these projects or planning your maintenance schedule. Making sure everyone is identified and working on those details is very important. And then once those tasks are completed, you can document that within HomeZada. The other, the third way of getting information to your network is you can invite family members into HomeZada. You can invite actually anyone into HomeZada, but I'm going to give you a tidbit on this. Very, very, very important. Please watch the rest of this video if you're going to consider this. You can invite anyone into your home's audit. It can be your contractors, it can be your family members, it could be your children, it can be your spouses, external family members, it could be trustees, it could be estate planners, insurance, anyone. Okay, and you can do it very simplistically by sending them an email, and there's a share functionality In the account portion of HomeZada. However, this is what's very important: if you share your HomeZada account with anyone, they will see everything in your account. I need you to be aware of that. They will see everything in your account. For instance, if you're working with a specific maintenance contractor, you invite them in your system. You think that they may only see the maintenance tasks associated with them. That is not true. They will see everything: your inventory list, your project planning, your finances, your insurance carrier. They will see everything. So if you're going to invite people into HomeZada, please make sure it's trusted people that are going to use the information in HomeZada for the purposes of helping you manage your house. And nothing else. Okay. One of the things I oftentimes recommend is that you invite a spouse into HomeZada. Maybe that spouse is still not gonna take a proactive approach to having this, but if something were to happen to one spouse, the other spouse has access to that data and they can get information and make those decisions very quickly. All families can connect together if you use this sharing functionality. Which is also very valuable. So we've talked about this before in a previous video. There was a family that needed to move their mother to a retirement community for her own safety. The family was spread out in various locations in the United States, but they wanted access— and these are her children— they wanted access to the information just for documentation's sake, not for, I need this or I need that. But just to make sure that everyone understood what was in the house, and that way, if anything were— was to go missing, then everyone is in alignment as to what was there. So that's also another valuable reason why sharing your property with specific family members could be valuable. In another case, you may want to consider sharing your property with trustees, so people who will eventually help execute your will and trust and etc. when your time has come to move on to the next phase of life. And, um, that's also a good way to make sure that they have access to the data, or an attorney or something to that effect if you've decided to go that way. But sharing this data with the appropriate companies or individuals, whether it's insurance companies through Excel spreadsheets or PDFs, whether it's estate planners through the same process, Whether it is maintenance contracts with a print component. And by the way, once you print that screen, you can also email it. So that's something to keep in mind. Just because it says print doesn't mean you can't download it and send it off to somebody. Acknowledging the project planning that you've done with your contractors, designers, etc., and then also sharing with family members of all sorts and lawyers and everything else is very important to understand what is happening in your home, taking action to make sure your home is healthy, safe, and efficient, and also making sure you have the appropriate action if something were to take place and unfortunately you were no longer physically on this earth. All these things are very, very important. I'm a big firm believer in sharing my information with specific individuals, specifically my spouse. Making sure that he has access to that information is very, very important, just in case something were to happen, but more importantly, because he can access the data wherever he is. So if he has a question of anything going on in the property, he can do that. So keep in mind, these are the few ways you can share your property. Also, once again, I'm going to make sure I'm bringing this caveat. If you invite people into your HomeZada system through the email sharing capability, They will see everything in HomeZada. So I want to make sure that you're aware of that because you need to think that through and make sure that there's nothing that could be abused in your system by a third party. So thank you so much for watching. Please, please, please, please, please, if you have any questions about this, we can answer any of your questions. Go to the comments below, let us know at info@homezada.com. For those of you who are not familiar with HomeZada, don't understand what we do, I invite you to actually go visit us at homezada.com and you'll learn about how you can manage your house the most efficiently and effectively and easy. So have a great day and thank you so much for watching this video.