Tracking Documents is So Easy with HomeZada

Hi everyone, it's Beth Dodson here with HomeZada. Let me close this blind a little bit for you. I wanted to touch base with all of you and wish you a happy 4th. I hope you all had an amazing 4th of July. I hope the barbecues were just going and hamburgers and hot dogs were on the grill and corn and whatever else you were having. I hope you had a great 4th of July. Parties are over. Now it's time to get back to work. I know my schedule has been crazy busy. So first of all, let me say thank you for joining me if you're joining me live, and for those of you who are watching this after the fact, thank you for watching this. We really appreciate all your support, and if you like this, please pass it forward. So what are we going to talk about today? We're going to talk about tracking your home documents. And one of the things that I love about what HomeZada can do is it can track all of your home documents in one central location. And that was really important for me personally, and I know it's important for a lot of our customers, because they wanna know what's happening in their home, and they want those documents that are home-related inside a location where they can see it very easily. So, a couple categories of documents I wanna put in there, so I've got my little sheet sheet because I want to make sure I'm thorough with everybody. The first thing that you can track, as many of you already know, is photographs. But I want to give you some ideas on some ways to track photographs. The first way is obviously with inventory items. Tracking a photograph of an inventory item, super simple. You can track the front of it, the side of it, the back of it. If you have items that have serial numbers on them, you can take photographs of those serial numbers. You just can get as much detail as possible. I tend to do that, tracking multiple angles of photos when I need to see the lengths of something or I need to see what it looks like in different lights in a room. I also track multiple photographs of my items. For instance, like my computers, 'cause I love computers, I'm in technology. And I take photographs of the front of it, it standing, it closed, the serial number. I just like to make sure that I'm documenting exactly what I own. And with using my phone, It's so easy, why wouldn't I? So you can track photos at multiple angles. What most people are unaware of is you can actually track photos of maintenance projects. So I'm big at doing this. If there's something that's broken in my house, and I'll give you a perfect example. I have this light on an outside deck and the light fixture is loose. It's hard to describe. Even though I'm trying, um, it's loose, and so I need to fix it. So what I do is I take a photograph of the way it's broken, and then I share that with my husband, and I walk through the process with him and say, okay, how can we fix this? And if we can't do it, then we actually call someone who can help us, and we just find them through random, uh, ways of finding all our different contractors. But we actually fix that. So I like to take the issue of what it was. Sometimes I take the fix as well of what that problem is, and I indicate that the maintenance task was done. And I like to do that because if I have the same maintenance problem, I want to know what a better fix is. And this particular problem I'm describing, it happens every year. It's on this outside deck and the, the, the rain and the wind comes, and so it jiggles something loose. So I need to find a more permanent method to fix this so I don't have to fix this every year. So that's why I like to take photographs just to track my maintenance. The other area of tracking photos is projects. I'm a firm believer tracking before and after photos is the coolest thing ever because you get to see what's going on in your house. The before, the after. You can showcase it when you want to sell your house. You can share it with your friends. Your family can see it. You just get to see the before and after. I even Um, did this. I took pictures of the before and after in my attic and in my closet because my closet was a disaster. And so I just Martha Stewarted. But before I could Martha Stewart, I have to take everything out. So, um, it was wild what I saw before and what I saw after, and I don't want it to get messy again. So I just constantly am purging from my closet. Same thing with my attic, constantly keeping things out of there and keeping a clear path and walkway so I can get in and out of that attic easily. So really exciting. So you can take photographs in a multitude of ways, and I highly recommend it. Always remember to take photos of the outside of your house, both the front and the backyard, because you just can, and why not? You can see things that are working properly in your house on the outside as well as on the inside. Uh, the other thing you can track— owner's manuals. A lot of people ask me about owner's manuals, and one of the things they ask me about is Do I really want to scan all my owner's manuals? I'm a firm believer that that's probably not necessary. First of all, figure out which owner's manuals are really critical to what you may reference in the future, and those key owner's manuals you can find online. One of the things I use is manualsonline.com. I also use the vendor sites that I the people that— the manufacturers that have these things. And I always take the PDF and I put it in HomeZada, and I can drag and drop that. Super simple. So that's the other thing I do. And I take it with pertinent information, but those owner's manuals are kind of a pain in the neck, so I just don't want to take the time to scan them when I can just quickly find them and drag and drop on HomeZada. So much easier. So you can do that. Um, that I believe is a feature you have to do on the desktop. 'Cause mobile technology, I'm not sure it can do that. But you can download it and then upload again. Warranties. If you have warranties on items, I highly recommend you track the warranty data, but I also recommend that you actually add when the warranty is gonna run out on something that's important to you and create a maintenance task alerting you months prior to that warranty running out, seeing if you need to update something. I had this situation happen to me It was expensive. With a pool. And I had tiles that were falling off my pool. And as it turns out, I was so busy with work and just doing things that I was unable to get the repair done in time within maintenance. So I, years ago, this was years ago, I had to drain my whole pool and resurface it and retile it. Yes, that is expensive to do. So I had to save money to do it. But it was time, I had to do it. And so I had to drain it and then fix it and then refill it. That just— time-consuming, time-consuming, expensive. What more can I say? So I didn't want to be in that position again where I had to repair something. So what I did was I took the maintenance— or excuse me, the warranty contract— and I put that in the system. And And then from there, what I did was I set a maintenance task item 6 months prior to the end of my warranty, because I wanted to check, make sure those tiles stayed in, make sure the surface was good, make sure there was nothing wrong with my pool, because I wanted to take care of it within that warranty period rather than being stuck like I was before. So good tip is to take those warranties, but also add the dates and then add a maintenance task to alert you when they will be coming due, 'cause it's really, really important if in case it's something really, really big. You might wanna do that with electronics as well. Sometimes electronics run into wonky things after a while, so you have to do that. You're gonna know. I like that word wonky, don't know why. Contracts with service providers. So I have a lot of contracts in my own home zada, only because I hate paperwork. when it comes to my house. And so the contracts that I have are contracts maybe with my house cleaner, so I know my rates for my house cleaners. And oftentimes I will add those in the contact section of HomeZada. So I add them in the contact section. I also have— I get my air conditioning units checked twice a year, air conditioning, heating, because I want to make sure they're operating properly and I want to know when I need to replace them. The last thing I want is for my air conditioning unit to break in the middle of 100-degree weather. Just crazy town. So I have them checked, so I have my contracts for that done every year, and that's just a maintenance task, so I put it in my maintenance functionality. If you have landscapers or any other types of service providers that come in regularly, maybe you have a concierge maintenance contact contractor that comes in whether it's monthly or quarterly, maybe you have Someone that cleans your windows once a year, cleans your carpets. You can add all those contracts in the system. The good thing is some of my contractors are moving digital, so they send me an electronic version. All I have to do is drag and drop, which is amazing. I love that. I also track new projects. So whether I'm working with, you wanna add a new pool, or you wanna get new construction on your house, or you wanna repaint your house, or something to that effect, you just have new projects, whether they're big aesthetic projects, design projects, or whether they're a complete remodel or what have you. I'm a firm believer I track all of my contracts, and I usually track them in the project section of HomeZada, because I wanna know that they're there. I also like to track any permits that are necessary and engineering approvals, if necessary. So I like all those inspections and stuff. Just to be documented in one central place in case someone comes back to me when I'm ready to sell my house and they say, well, we can't find these in the county records. I'm like, whoa, I have everything right here. And that way I can be a forethought person in managing the details about my home. I don't have to wait for another entity to do that. Some people might call me a control freak, but I am. Um, The other thing that I look at is real estate documents. So real estate documents are big and bulky, and by law we have to sign a variety of real estate documents, both federal and state laws, and those are to protect us. So I understand why we have to do this, but one of the things that I get frustrated with is that it's a big stack of documents inside my house. So I do take those documents and I scan those in my system if I don't have them electronically. Some companies are now offering those electronically. I scan those in my system and I load them up in one area, and I usually load them in the property documents section of my HomeZada. And the reason why I do that is because I know exactly what my real estate documents are in that section, and I can find them immediately. I will also put my property tax documents there. And when they were paid, and then just have a record of it. I'll also put in any, let's say you have a new construction, I'll put construction documents. Let's say you bought a lot, I'll have a lot, land documents and real estate documents associated with that. If you've refinanced your house, oftentimes, I did this 'cause I thought it was kinda cool, I had my original, loan documents for my mortgage, and then I have my refi documents so that I can compare them. And it just— it's not necessary, but if you want to do that and you are as particular as I am, you can do that. Um, you can add appraisals. So appraisals are usually part of your real estate document package, but you can also segment them out and showcase them. And then be careful when you are scanning them because sometimes People paste photos still. Oftentimes they're still digital, so you can see them digitally, but just be careful because those photos can get stuck in your scanner. And then I also put title documents, and those title documents are basically details about the house that go into where the title has passed over the years and who owns it and those kinds of things. And just, I find those very important because you just never know when something might come up. So I just do that. The other set of documents, I think it's the 7th type of documents, is personal documents. Oftentimes I look at personal documents as trusts, wills, maybe life insurance, maybe some other areas that you want to track some information on. I actually load them into HomeZada, and I do it because I'm not a big fan of paper sitting around my house. I actually like to be organized with paper as much as I can in systems, and so by having those documents in that location, I can access them immediately. Or God forbid something happened to me, my individual who will— my trustee who will take on my responsibility of my things, they can access HomeZada immediately and get and have at it. It's just super simple. They don't have to even do anything, don't even need to set foot in my house. They can just take care of everything within HomeZada. So I use the personal documents mostly for estate planning. That's just me personally. Um, I always am always over-prepared. I just— you guys must think I'm crazy, but I am. I'm over-prepared all the time because you just never know what could happen. And, um, I want to make life as easy for those people who are helping me out as possible. Uh, the 8th type of document that I track is household documents. So anything from my insurance I like to track my insurance documents over time because I get to see when it starts going up. That feels a little sneaky, but it's not, because I want to know when my insurance goes up, and then I want to know if I can renegotiate the insurance or if I need to go find another vendor. Design documents. So any type of— maybe you have design documents about the house that you've done either with a professional or you've done it on your own. Just understanding what you have. receipts for items. Sometimes I will track them in the actual inventory area attached to that item. Sometimes I'll put them in the space area because maybe I went through a room, I guess, design. Yeah, I guess I use an interior designer for a room and had to get that done. Hi Keith Russell, thanks for joining us. I hope you're doing well. So, um, I track all those design documents in a variety of locations, whether it's space, whether it's item, whatever the case may be. But these household documents are also really important, um, because you want to know what's going on in your house. And that's the whole premise of HomeZada, is to be able to track everything in one section of your life in, um, HomeZada. And I'm also a firm believer that I love homes. I wanted to track all of my, my everything about my home in one place. I mean, I truly believe that because as consumers we spend 31% of our income on our homes. It's a lot of money. So I want to be able to make sure I know where everything is, all my documents, all of my details about my house. So documents are pretty critical, and I gave you some ideas on how you can track all these different documents if you do have items like business cards for your professionals. Sometimes you want to quickly scan those in. You can load them up in the contact section. You know, this is something simple. Maybe you've got coupons that you want to remember. You can do that too. So anything you can imagine from a document perspective, you can, um, do all of that job and add it into the system. Now, one of the things that, um, I have done, so I'm just going to give you kind of an example of what happened in my house because it was document central in this place. I actually had documents personally in five different locations in my house, and I don't know about you. Maybe you guys are a little bit more consolidated, but I had documents everywhere, and it was crazy town. And just directing my husband. Where the documents were when he would ask me a question. It was just challenging. So I like efficiency. So now that I have all my documents in HomeZada, I no longer have those documents in my house. Paper-free. It's amazing. And I gotta tell you, I love it, love it, love it, love it, love it, love it, because I have a central location and I can access those documents anywhere I am when in the world. Wherever I'm traveling that I have an internet or cellular connection. It's amazing. I love that stuff. So I hope these tips have been helpful for you. Thank you, Keith Russell, for joining us on this Facebook Live. And you know, Keith also said he had this issue of paper everywhere. So you know, you can check out HomeSada and start using it and add your documents. Amazing. I will be the first one to say. It's out of this world. Like, the documents alone are worth like so much of your time and efficiency. So I wanna thank you all for joining us. For those of you who are watching this after the fact, thank you for coming. Share this with everybody you know. We can help them get better efficient and organized with their documents and see everything all in one spot. Have a great day and happy, I guess, upcoming weekend for the summer. Have a good day. Bye.