The True Cost of Deferred Home Maintenance
Buying a home is a significant investment: for most of us, it will be the biggest purchase we’ll ever make and the biggest debt we’ll ever take on. Which can set your heart racing once you realize that the house itself is just a collection of home renovation bills waiting to be paid.
When most people buy a house using the traditional down payment and mortgage model, they look at the cost of ownership simply: mortgage payment, plus homeowners association fees, plus taxes and insurance. This alone can add up to a significant amount of your income – most lenders advise that your monthly mortgage payment should not exceed 28 percent of your income, and your total debt should not exceed 36 percent.
But these numbers don’t take into account the cost of maintaining your home, which can be a lot more than you think.
Maintenance costs
It is generally recommended to assume that the cost of maintaining your home will be about 1-4 percent of its value per year, or somewhere around $150-500 (or more) per month, depending on where you live and what kind of home you have. you home. This is on top of your mortgage, taxes, homeowners association and insurance payments, and this applies to both new construction and old homes. This is because maintenance is not a fixed cost. Your house may not present any problems for you right away, but when things start to break down, they will be very expensive to repair, so by saving money on a regular basis, you will have them on hand when things go wrong. For example, a tiled roof has a lifespan of 15–30 years, your HVAC system can last 20 years, and your water heater is likely to fail before 15 years have passed.
In other words, nothing in your home is likely to fail on the same schedule, but everything is constantly breaking down in slow motion. The key to managing both your home’s steady decline and controlling these rising costs is to avoid putting off home repairs.
Delayed maintenance will cost you more in the future
Delayed maintenance is an easy trap to fall into. You buy a house, write a bunch of checks, and move in, and you’re tired and ready to enjoy your new living space. That way you don’t worry about the housing inspector saying your roof is a bit long and you decide to hope the paint on your wood windows will last another winter. Instead of flushing your water heater , you prefer to imagine hot water magically appearing in your shower every morning. Instead of messing up your beautiful wood siding, you figure you’ll have enough warning before it starts to fail.
Delayed maintenance is basically any type of repair, preventative treatment, or inspection that you have to do but choose not to do, either because you’re lazy or because you don’t have the money. And of course, you don’t know what you don’t know – sometimes it’s a real surprise to find that you actually have to clean those gutters every year. But whatever the cause, the cost of fixing the problem, once it occurs, is sure to be much more expensive than maintaining your home all the time.
How much will deferral maintenance cost you?
Some homeowners struggle with this concept because things cost what they cost, right? For example, if your new roof costs you $7,500, it will cost you $7,500 regardless of whether you check the salary every year and put a fresh reflective coating on it … right? What you’re forgetting is the element of time: Regular maintenance of your roof can cost you $100 in materials each year, but can extend the life of your current roof by 5 to 10 years – years your money could be in the bank. interest bill instead of being passed to the roofer.
Or pay attention to your windows. Cleaning and painting exterior wood windows (and resealing windows, no matter what they’re made of) doesn’t cost much, except for your time, but replacing windows is expensive . If you have 10 windows and you find they are badly rotting, you will need between $2,000 and $20,000 to replace them . If you put in the effort to take care of your windows, they can last as long as you live in the house. And it’s not just the windows themselves: even if they’re made of composite, fiberglass, or vinyl, the window system almost certainly has a wood frame. A leaking vinyl window may never rot, but it does cause severe rot on the frame around it or on the wall below it.
By keeping up with maintenance and pushing back replacement costs by a few years, you can actually earn interest on your repair funds. And if you’ve been living in a house for decades, having to replace your roof once rather than two or three times is a significant savings.
There are many other maintenance tasks that can cost you a lot more if you put them off:
- Exteriors. If you have wood siding, it will need to be stained or painted every 3 to 7 years , depending on the climate you live in, which can cost you several thousand dollars. Replacing wood siding will cost you $30,000 or more. Replacing stucco costs $6 to $9 per square foot on average (although it can cost a lot more), but regular patching and painting of stucco is much cheaper. And clogged gutters can cause a perfectly solid roof to collapse.
- Water heaters. Flushing the water heater every year is free, and replacing the anode rod (which attracts corrosive elements and wears out every few years) costs about $30. Doing both of these can increase the life of your water heater by 5-10 years, which can cost upwards of $1,000 to replace.
- Dye. Worn or dirty interior paint might be something you can put up with until you list your home for sale, but peeling or bubbling paint probably indicates a water problem that you should deal with immediately before you get dozens. one thousand dollars. mold and rot to deal with. Even a small leak can completely destroy your home if you don’t take care of it in a timely manner.
Finally, take into account the fact that deferred maintenance that results in a failure has a large indirect cost. If your roof is leaking, you should replace the roof and possibly the drywall on the ceiling and walls in the rooms below. If you’re waiting for your water heater to explode to do something about it, you may also need to take apart your basement floor due to water damage.
And the most subtle value may not show up until you try to sell the house. Deferred maintenance is likely to be obvious to the home inspector, if not the buyer. When people look at your home and see peeling paint, warped floors, and missing roof tiles, they’re mentally calculating how much you’ll offer them for a renovation loan to convince them to take a risk or they might leave. completely away.
Basically, every time you notice that something in your home isn’t working properly anymore, it’s a signal that you should put on your work clothes and have them replaced, repaired, or repaired—or hire someone to do it. it’s for you.
This post was revised after publication to clarify the cost of plaster replacement and to revise recommendations for how often you may need to renovate a wooden house on the outside.