One of the best parts of owning a home is the freedom it offers in terms of customization. With a home of your own, you decide what happens to it, what it looks like, and what features you want to add to improve your quality of life. Though this is true from the perspective of ownership, the home itself can have other ideas. When you are planning to own a home, an eventuality you may have considered is the process of maintaining it. While renting, you had a landlord to deal with maintenance, but now it is up to you. With freedom comes responsibility, and maintenance is one of the most important.
When planning your finances, it is essential to keep maintenance, especially preventative maintenance, in mind. This consideration will keep you one step ahead of any possible malfunctions that could adversely impact your daily life and your wallet. There is always the prevailing thought of wanting to wait until something breaks before replacing it. But what often gets overlooked in those instances is what happens when it breaks.
Imagine having a car on its last legs, but you refuse to buy a new one until this one is in the ground. What happens when it breaks down in the middle of your commute in the middle of the week? You will have to scramble to find alternative means of transportation and move the car from the road while still getting to work on time. All this while searching for a new car. Now, imagine if instead of a car, it is your roof or your air conditioner. Depending on when that happens, it could lead to a few less than fun days in the home and more than a little bit of money.
Ongoing maintenance fund
One way to alleviate this issue is to have an ongoing maintenance fund you can allocate for preventive and emergency maintenance. Not only does preventative maintenance save you money in the long run, as repairing something is usually cheaper than replacing something, you will also save the money that would have gotten spent on the repercussions of something breaking. To continue our example, instead of selling the car earlier and buying a new one, you now have to pay to tow it from where it died. You also have to rush to buy a new car and figure out what alternative form of travel will get you to work. This procrastination is money stacking up that you may not have prepared to spend on this. In his book, Your Money: The Missing Manual, J.D. Roth wrote, “for every dollar you spend on maintenance [on our home], we’d avoid roughly $100 in future repairs.”
Planning for maintenance means you will absorb some of the impacts when something breaks or when you notice that something should get fixed ahead of time. You will not be wondering where that money will come from because you will have already planned for it and set that money aside. This planning separates home costs from personal finance, so you know where you stand with both. It eliminates the guesswork when planning your monthly budget, as a set amount will go to savings and the maintenance fund. From this fund, you will have peace of mind knowing that you are ready for anything that may happen to the biggest asset that you own.
One way to plan for the future is to set up an OJO Homeowner maintenance fund, which rewards you for saving and integrates timelines and alerts to keep you on track. The OJO Homeowner maintenance fund will help to put you in the maintenance mindset. This is proactive and keeps things functioning as they should, and it focuses on the long-term. This focus will keep you ahead of major disruptions in day-to-day life as you communicate with service professionals about maintenance. This continued business with service professionals will also help you build a relationship with them, which can save you money in the long run.
Savings and home valuation
All of this put together means that regular maintenance can end up paying you when you add up all the savings. Maintaining not only systems in your home but also the appliances will maintain the value of your home, which will increase the value of your home over time. Part of homeownership is the equity you build while owning it. By maintaining all of the individual parts in your home, you will have a fully valued home if you ever go to sell. You will not lose money off your offers for a bad roof or an old air conditioner.
Maintaining your home’s value is incredibly valuable because part of owning a home is the potential of selling it later on and making money off of it. If you follow the maintenance mindset, you will have allocated for each bit of maintenance that has needed to happen. Building your savings over the years of owning your home will pay off when you go to sell.
Conclusion
Homeownership is one of the joys that many people look forward to in their life. Having a home that fits you just right is an amazing feeling that there is nothing quite like. However, peace of mind comes with making sure that every part of your home is protected. Not just for its value, but you and your family.
The strength of your home is only as strong as the pieces that make it up. Maintaining those pieces will not only save you money in the long run, as we have discussed so far, but it will also help the value of your home. The best way to stay on top of this maintenance is to start an OJO Homeowner maintenance fund. All you have to do is go to the website and sign up for free, and you will be on your way to planning for the future. Start your journey with a maintenance mindset today by making a maintenance fund at https://homeowner.ojo.com/signup
