Being a homeowner is expensive business these days. The cost of buying a home in the first place is starting to get out of control. Even after you’ve managed to save up the money for a deposit and found a house that is in your budget, you’ll still be spending a lot of cash.
The running costs of a home are always going up and first time buyers often underestimate how much it’s going to cost. If you’ve been renting and all of the repairs etc. are covered by your landlord, you won’t be used to paying for it all yourself. You shouldn’t let that put you off buying your own place though, you just need to use these simple tricks to cut the cost of running your home.
Cut Your Insurance Bill
Home insurance is a necessary cost and avoiding it can easily come back to bite you if you end up getting broken into. Even though you can’t avoid it completely, you can massively cut the amount that you’re paying.
Insurance companies base their price on a few factors; firstly, the value of the items in the home, which you can’t do much about. Secondly, they’ll consider the likelihood of a break in. If you’re living in a neighborhood that has a high crime rate, that’ll push up your insurance quote. There isn’t much you can do about it but you can make the house more secure.
By installing security cameras and lights, reinforcing locks and making sure all entry points are secured, you’ll make it harder for people to get into the house and the insurance company will adjust the price of your policy accordingly.
Do Regular Maintenance
Fixing up the house is time consuming and costs money so you might think it’s better to avoid it if you want to cut the cost of running the house. The thing is, damage that is left is only going to get worse until it gets to the point where you’ve got no choice but to fix it. By that time, the repairs will be way more expensive than they would have been if you just made small repairs in the first place. Always do regular maintenance and see do things yourself as far as possible.
Buy New Appliances
Buying expensive appliances seems counterproductive when you’re trying to save money but you’ve got to think of the long term. Older appliances are very inefficient and use a lot of energy while newer ones use minimal amounts.
With the price of electricity and gas going up all the time, anything you can do to use less energy will save you a lot of money in the long run. Replacing your fridges, washing machines etc. with newer models will cost a lot upfront but you’ll make all that money back in a year or two in reduced bills. You can also save loads of cash by swapping out your light bulbs for newer LED ones.
Make these 3 simple changes and you can make the cost of running your house a lot cheaper.
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