Why Your Home Needs Its Own Email Address
A new home has many moving parts. There may seem to be no end to the circulating documents and contacts, from insurance information, mortgage documents and new invoices to pay bills to any number of contractors offering who knows what services.
With the ability to store all this information digitally comes the burden of noise sorting. On the one hand, you probably don’t want your personal inbox filled with spam from people offering to mow your lawn. On the other hand, who knows when you might need to remember the name and number of the shipping company you used?
The good news is that you don’t have to condemn yourself or your partner’s inbox to all this information. Instead, you should create a dedicated email for your home.
Benefits of Dedicated Home Email
Gone are the days when only one person in the house knew exactly where to find that one piece of insurance information in that one filing cabinet in the basement.
- Everything in one place. Creating an email account for your home will take a few minutes, but will pay off in years. From now on, you will have one designated place to send and search for all house-related documents and contact information. Your digital records will be securely and easily organized, and you’ll know exactly where to look for contact information for a random contractor three years from now.
- Consolidated power/labor in the household. Of course, one person in your family can create a folder for everything related to the house. But even if your family shares power and domestic labor in this way, life is uncertain. It’s helpful to have a dedicated email that everyone has equal access to in case one person can’t log in. (Not to mention, one folder for everything home-related would be one hell of a folder to fill.)
- Cleaning up your own mailbox. It’s ideal to create your new home’s email before you start the moving process so you can get all your moving-related information to the right place (and away from your personal or work email) from the get-go. But even if you’ve been living in your home for many years, creating a dedicated email address for it now can offload your personal email folders and give you a new opportunity to tidy up, forward what you might need in the future, and clean up what you don’t. you know you don’t need anymore.
Reminders for home email
- Create descriptive folders in your home email so you can easily find “lease agreement” or “drywall guy” when you need it.
- Make sure everyone agrees on the password and keep it in a safe place.
- Use this email account for household related matters only. If you start using it as a repository for all kinds of spam, it will lose its purpose as a small but powerful household hack.
A separate email account for your home is a game changer in terms of organization. A dedicated home email ensures that anyone with a password can find what they need, when they need it.