Say "Ahh..."

I cannot believe that in all my months of blogging that I have not used–I checked–one of my most favorite quotes of all time. Benjamin Franklin once said, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” The gist of it is that it’s easier and cheaper to fix something small than it is once it grows too large. It sounds like Franklin’s original intent might have been health-related (think cancer), but it can be applied to anything that needs maintenance (think car problems).

Your house is no different.

Side note; if you are renting, you can thank your lucky stars at this point. Renters are not responsible for regular home maintenance. However, this is also one thing that potential home-owners don’t usually think about when they are getting “house-hungry” and “throwing their money away on rent.” If you have too much debt when you try to buy a home, you are probably asking for more financial trouble. Now, let us return to the subject at hand.

Why this time of year? You ask? Well, the weather is getting warmer and there is more daylight. It’s usually not yet too hot to get outside to assess damage and make repairs. You can actually see what impairment winter might have caused. Your air conditioning repairman probably isn’t totally booked solid–yet. And depending on where you live, your lawn might not yet need a totally functioning sprinkler system.

Now, my job isn’t to tell you what you need to check (Google is great for that). My responsibility here is to motivate you to create the right checklist for you, get that checklist done, and put aside money for future needs. So, get to it.