In this YouTube presentation, Beth Dotson from HomeZada explains how the HomeZada platform helps homeowners manage the financial aspects of homeownership. She emphasizes that homeowners typically spend about 33% of their annual income on their homes, making it crucial to monitor and control those costs. Dotson walks through six key financial categories that can be tracked within HomeZada: (1) insurance data – recording policies and ensuring inventory is adequately covered; (2) mortgage information – capturing rates, terms, payoff schedules, and visualizing payoff scenarios; (3) home equity – monitoring equity growth from mortgage payments and market appreciation; (4) forecasted property values – using third‑party data to anticipate future home worth and inform decisions about selling or borrowing against equity; (5) annual home operating expenses – logging utilities, service providers, and other recurring costs to understand the true cost of running a home; and (6) an overall balance‑sheet view – aggregating expenses, assets, liabilities, and equity into a concise financial snapshot. Throughout, she links these data points to practical outcomes: better budgeting, reduced financial stress, informed project planning, and smarter decisions about home improvements or debt repayment. The presentation concludes with a call to action for viewers to engage with HomeZada via comments, email, or the website.
Chapters
Hi everyone, Beth Dotson here with HomeZada. I hope you're having a fabulous day. Today we want to talk about the types of finances you can manage specifically inside HomeZada. And, um, one— some of these home finances are, are very important, but let me talk about the 6 major types of finances that we can manage in HomeZada so that It helps you become the best homeowner you can be, but more importantly, it helps you with your overall finances. So just a reminder, we spend approximately 33% of our annual income on our homes, and that comprises of a lot of different areas, which I'm going to go into next. But 33% is a lot of money. We want to make sure that we can keep it at 33% and not extend it to something closer to 40 or even 45%. That just starts eating into other areas of our life. So the first thing you can track in HomeZada is insurance data. Understanding the data that you have about your insurance, and then also understanding whether the inventory that you have and the value of that inventory is covered with the insurance policy that you currently have. And if it's not, you can actually take your inventory into your insurance agent or provider and review it with them so that they can give you the appropriate coverage. So that's the first area. So insurance data, it's really important. The second thing that you can track is your mortgage information. So specifically within Homes.com's features, specifically the finance features, the mortgage information is provided to you in a couple of different ways. We pull in third-party public data, and that information is everything from your rates, your type of mortgage that you have, the mortgage provider that you have, the term of your mortgage, and then even the payoff. of that mortgage based on the type of mortgage you have and the rate and, um, the loan amount, etc. So you can track all of this information about your mortgage, which is also important. And then you can see a graphical representation of when you're going to pay it off, which gets really exciting because you can also test what adjustments look like inside Homesata on the mortgage value. And then the reason why that's important is the third area you can track is the equity in your home. As you pay off your mortgage, you build more equity in your home. Now, equity is not just built from paying off your mortgage; it's also built from market conditions as well. And so the fourth area you can track is forecasted values of your property. We also pull this in through third-party data, and this helps you understand that with these forecasted values over time, do I want to sell my house? Don't I want to sell my house? What the value could be. And then also, how much equity do I have in my home? And then when's my mortgage payoff? Understanding why you have equity in your home, in addition to the forecasted values, is important because you may need those funds for something else. You may need to use that for paying off student debt. You may need to use it for paying off any other kind of credit card debt. You may need to use it for paying medical bills. I'm not a big proponent of automatically getting an equity loan to pay off all this information. My conversation to you is to review your rates on all your different loans, review your terms, review your overall income to determine how you pay all these different programs off. Because using the equity in your home may not be the best opportunity, but it is there for you if you need it for these types of things. Even remodeling projects, a lot of people use equity loans for remodeling projects, and sometimes they're short-term loans that can be paid off quickly. The 5th area of tracking finances in HomeZada is your annual expenses. So knowing what you're annually spending on your home from your PG&E bill— I'm sorry, I'm in California— your electric bill or any other utilities, whether you have a landline in your home or you don't, whether you have water bills, disposal bills, so waste removal. Do you have ongoing service providers that come to your home. So do you have a landscaper that maybe comes to your home or not? You may do it yourself. Do you have cleaning services that come to your home? Do you have a maintenance professional that comes to your home maybe quarterly or what have you? But tracking those expenses will also help you understand what the, um, actual cost to run the home is. So it's also important. And then the 6th area that we track on as it relates to finances inside HomeZada, which is extremely valuable, is it takes all of this information and it basically gives you a mini balance sheet of your overall expenses in your home. And so what that does is it looks like that you have your expenses, so your annual expenses that you're spending on your home, any maintenance costs that you're spending because you're tracking your maintenance in HomeZada, and you're tracking the completed costs of the completed tasks but also the cost of those maintenance tasks. You're also tracking the projects that you're doing for the year. So getting all that information and understanding it is a total compilation of your expenses so that you can manage that. But the second thing we're also tracking is the asset values of your home. What's the equity in your home? What is the total asset value of all your possessions that you own minus any type of loans you have on the home, whether it's a mortgage, whether it's a home equity, whatever the case may be? And then that will give you your total asset value or your liabilities to assets, like a balance sheet, expenses to assets. And so these are really important in understanding exactly what you're spending on your home, understanding how much of your annual income you're actually spending on your home, helping you make decisions on how do I adjust areas of my spend if I need to, or can I postpone certain projects And do them year over year over year rather than doing everything all at once. There's a lot of different variables that the system can give you to make better decisions, and that way you can be the best homeowner you can be. But more importantly, you can be more financially aware of what's going on in your home as it applies to your overall expenses. Um, want to just touch base on a couple of different things as it relates to why it's important to track your expenses. I already explained that 33% of our income on our homes is what we spend annually. That's really, really expensive. If anything goes haywire, then you may have incurred unexpected costs, and that could be a problem because you may not have that budget aligned, or you may have to take it from a different budget, which can just get frustrating and annoying to most people. A lot of those unexpected expenses actually come from the lack of maintenance. So it's important to stay on top of maintenance to make sure that you can manage your expenses and that you could even manage that repair cost. The third area is project planning. I can't tell you how many people I talked to recently that talked to me about they didn't do project planning, they just jumped into the project, and they are massively over budget and they have no way of paying for the project. And so 2 things are happening. They're either not finishing the project or they're scaling back on the project and the challenge is if you don't finish a project then you could actually devalue your home or it could become difficult to sell if you need to sell it in the future, so it— all kinds of problems happen when you don't have project planning and then finally when it comes to all of this, finances, let's face it, they all tend to give us a little bit of stress, our finances do anyway. But if we have all these unexpected repairs, our increase in our home budgets go up, and we have poor project planning and we can't finish our projects, then all of a sudden our stress levels are generally off the charts. We are anxious, we're getting in fights with our family, we're getting frustrated. It's becoming difficult to live in our homes together as a family because people are stressed out, and we want to avoid all that. So When it comes to tracking your finances, HomeZada's financial system can help you with a lot of this data. And we wanna continue to improve on that so that we can help you understand how the best way to care for your home and how to actually manage your budgeting strategy as it relates to your home. So as an example of that, you don't need to do all your projects this year. You can actually do a little bit each year and you can do a little bit each quarter or each month. So I know it's hard to imagine that being the case, but I'm a big proponent of that. I do a project a year, uh, just who I am, and I budget for it. And until I have the money, I do not do the project, and I actually allocate money for that project throughout the year. So these are the things you can track in Homesatta's financial system. You can track your insurance data, your mortgage information, your equity in your home, your forecasted value of your home, your annual expenses, and an overall balance sheet to understand your overall expenses that you're spending on your home. So if you have any questions about HomeZada's financial information and its app with inside the overall platform, please let us know. You can leave us comments below or you can reach out to us at info@homezada.com. And if you want to check out HomeZada because you're not familiar with us, I invite you to go visit us at www.homezada.com. Have a fabulous day and happy house planning!
