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You don’t have to maintain your own home if you don’t like doing so. You just need to make sure you can afford to pay someone to do it for you. Read on to learn more.
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When you buy a home, you take on a lot. Not only are you required to keep up with ongoing mortgage payments, but you need to perform all of the work and maintenance needed to keep your home in good shape.
According to a recent Angi survey, 59% of male homeowners said they find home improvements and maintenance enjoyable. But what if you’re part of the 41% who don’t feel that way?
If you fall into that category, I can relate. I’ve owned my current home for about 14 years, and while I’m okay with doing light maintenance myself, I refuse to spend every other weekend tackling home projects. Not only do I not find that work particularly fun, but I’m not very handy.
My husband, unlike me, is handy. But he’s also busy. He works full-time, volunteers for our community, and has parenting responsibilities to uphold. And that just doesn’t leave a lot of time for maintenance, even though he actually does enjoy some of that work.
If you’re in the camp of not particularly liking home maintenance, or not having the capacity to handle it, you should know that it’s perfectly okay to outsource most or even all of it if you so choose. The key, however, is to make sure that’s something you can afford.
When you’re not a fan of maintenance work
My husband and I knew we’d face a lot of expenses upon buying our house. That’s why we made a point to go in with a solid amount of cash in our savings account. And while we try to reserve our emergency fund for home repairs, and not routine maintenance, if need be, we could dip into our savings to pay for upkeep, too.
Now I will say that before we had kids, my husband and I did a lot more of our own maintenance ourselves. We mowed our own grass and did a lot of our own landscaping, and we painted and sealed our deck every year without help.
Since having kids, we’re left with less time to do all of those things plus work full time. So we intentionally leave ourselves room in our budget to pay to outsource a lot of our maintenance tasks.
Pad your savings and budget carefully
If you’re buying a home and you know that you don’t have the time or patience to maintain your home yourself, make sure to come in with a decent amount of savings and make room in your budget to pay someone to do the work you don’t want to handle. In many cases, paying for outside help is worth it. But you don’t want to get into debt because of it.
Our lawn service, for example, charges us $30 a week to mow our lawn and backyard. It would easily take my husband 60 minutes to do that, if not more. And it would probably take me 90 minutes or more, because I’m slower and less efficient.
Meanwhile, as someone who’s self-employed, I can earn a lot more than $30 doing 90 minutes of work. So I can justify that cost. And while my husband is on salary and doesn’t earn extra money for putting in more time at work, he finds his job rewarding. So I’d rather he have that extra time every week to build his skills than spend it pushing a lawn mower around — something he does not happen to find particularly fun or rewarding.
The point here is that it’s really okay to pay other people to maintain your home for you, and in many cases, it can even make financial sense. Just make sure it’s something you can afford so you don’t run into financial problems.
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