Taking care of your home can be incredibly expensive. Every year, you seem to put a huge dent in your bank account paying for cleanings, repairs and general upgrades. Would you be better off skipping these steps and saving your money? No. Here’s why.
Maintenance Can Prevent Disasters
Pushing your maintenance routine to a later date isn’t too much of a problem. It might cause you a little bit of inconvenience. But skipping the routine altogether? That’s a recipe for disaster. You might find yourself paying much more to recover from the consequences of your neglect than you would for the maintenance itself.
Think of it like this, you don’t have to clean out your gutters and downspouts right this second. But should you ignore this chore for the year? Absolutely not. When your gutters are clogged with leaves, sticks and other debris, they can’t do their job properly. They can’t direct rainwater into the downspout and away from the foundation. Instead, they fill up with water and spill it over the sides, directly onto the roof and into the foundation.
Ignoring a single afternoon of gutter maintenance could lead to:
- Roof leaks
- Ice dams (in winter)
- Water damage
- Cracks in the foundation
- Basement flooding
What can you do if it’s too late? If you’ve skipped an important bit of maintenance and don’t have the room in your budget for the repairs, you could go to the website CreditFresh and see whether you meet all of the requirements for a personal line of credit. A personal line of credit is an effective back-up plan for emergencies. If you’re approved for one, and your account is in good standing, you can withdraw an amount within your credit limit and may have it deposited in your bank account within a business day. So, you can handle the emergency repair right away.
Maintenance Helps Your Home Features Last Longer
Another reason why skipping maintenance can cost you? You won’t have to pay for repairs or flat-out replacements as often. Giving them a little TLC will help them stand the test of time.
Take your furnace. One simple project that you should do every few months is replacing your furnace filter — or if you have a reusable filter, you should clean it out and place it back in the slot. Leaving in filters for too long can damage the furnace. The filter collects too much dust and blocks the airflow, pushing the furnace to work harder and overheat. This could make the device breakdown long before it’s supposed to.
A furnace replacement is very expensive. A filter replacement isn’t.
Maintenance Helps Your Appliances Work Better
Maintenance helps your appliances work better, which can save you lots of money. This is because inefficient appliances use up more energy to get the job done.
Think of your dishwasher. You’ve noticed that your dishes came out dirty after running them through a cleaning cycle. So, you decide to run the machine again. They still look dirty. You repeat this step until the dishes look nice enough to use or until you give up and wash everything by hand. If you had remembered to clean out your dishwasher’s filter, your dishes would be perfectly clean after the first cycle.
Skipping home maintenance seems like a decision that will save you money at first. But soon enough, you can see that you’ll pay a lot more for your neglect.
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