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January 24, 2012Written By Paula Pant

How Much Does It Cost to Maintain A House?

It costs a lot more money than you think to maintain a house!

When we first purchased a house, we thought the only expense would be the mortgage. Haha!

Little did we realize that the mortgage is only the beginning.

Homeowners pay for an absurd amount of operations, maintenance and repairs:

Trash service. Water and sewer bills. Gutter cleaning. Termite treatment. Pest control. Power-washing. Replacing the siding, windows, roof, fascia, rotted joists, appliances, floorboards, drywall holes. HVAC tune-ups. Reinforcing a crumbling foundation.

The list goes on …

How can you estimate home repair costs? Read on.

What’s in a Mortgage?

First, let’s start with the obvious expense that leaps to everyone’s mind: the mortgage.

Your mortgage payment consists of four elements:

  • Principal (Your Equity/Ownership)
  • Interest
  • Property Taxes
  • Homeowner’s Insurance

Together, these are called “PITI” (Principal, Interest, Taxes, Insurance), which leads to the obvious joke: “Homeowner? What a pity!!”

How much will this cost? As of January 2015, the national average interest rate is 3.63 percent on a 30-year fixed loan for borrowers with good credit. If you’re cash-out refinancing a home, add one to two percent to the standard mortgage rate. If you’re putting less than 20 percent down (which I don’t recommend, unless you’re getting a screamin’ deal), you’ll also need to fork over private mortgage insurance, or PMI.

kitchen remodel

Insurance

As a general rule-of-thumb, homeowners insurance costs $4 per every $1,000 in home value, per year. (Or $400 per every $100,000 in home value.)

For example:

House: $200,000
Divided by 1000 = 200
Multiplied by $4 = $800

Homeowner’s insurance on this $200,000 house would cost $800 per year, which divides out to $67 per month.

Again, that’s a broad rule-of-thumb, so give yourself “wiggle room.” Remember: rental properties carry higher insurance premiums.

If your rental property is vacant, you’ll need “vacancy insurance,” which is more expensive than regular insurance. (We pay an additional $70 per month, on top of our regular homeowners insurance, for vacancy protection on a rental property that’s only worth $50,000.)

Water

When it comes to utilities, you control your destiny (within limits).

When we purchased our three-unit apartment building (triplex), the water bills regularly came to $350/month, or $120/month per apartment. Ouch!

So we embarked on an all-out Water Bill Offensive. We installed low-flow toilets, low-flow shower heads, and low-flow faucets coupled with additional aerators. We even redesigned the yard to minimize water usage. Eventually, we wrestled the water bill down to $120/month — only $40 per month per apartment. Hooray!

The moral of the story: You can chop (some) of your costs by more than half — but it’ll take focused effort in the beginning.

Trash

This rate will vary based on your city. We own 5 houses in Georgia, and pay around $33/month for every single-family home.

My triplex costs $100/mo for trash ($33 per unit * 3 units), because the City of Atlanta regards each unit as a separate home. Not all cities insist on charging multi-unit houses as “separate” houses, so research the policies of your particular city. If you have more than 4-5 units in a single building, it’s often cheaper to just forgo the city trash services and rent a dumpster through a private company (assuming your city allows this.)

Repairs and Maintenance

Here’s one of the BEST rules-of-thumb I’ve ever heard: Repairs and maintenance will cost one percent of the purchase price per year. In other words, for every $100,000 worth of house, you’ll spend $1,000 per year on maintenance.

“WTF? That sounds way too high.”

Au contraire, my friend.

  • Basic vinyl windows cost $250, including installation, permits and haul-off, and need replacement every 30 years. If your home has 20 windows, they cost $166 per year.
  • An asphalt-shingle roof on a 1,500-square-foot house will cost around $10,000 and needs to be replaced every 25 years. Your roof costs $400 per year.
  • Carpet, padding, installation, haul-away and disposal costs $15 per square yard and needs replacement every 8 years. If your home needs 100 square yards of carpeting, this costs $187.50 per year.

Apply this to everything: Water heater. HVAC. Gutters. Siding. Paint. Plumbing. Toilets. Shower valves. Countertops. Cabinets. Sink basins. Floor tile. Porches and decks. Appliances. Smoke alarms. Even outlet covers (yes, little things add up, especially when labor costs are involved).

We’re not done yet.

Those are replacement costs, but each year, you’ll have maintenance costs, as well. Your carpets need deep-cleaning. Your air-vents need professional suctioning. Your pressure-treated deck needs another coat of stain. You need to shell out for pest control, termite treatments, gutter cleaning, lawn aerating, re-sodding, mulching, weeding, re-sealing the grout around your tub.

Scared yet?

Don’t worry. This is where a “Home Repair Fund” comes into play.

Open a special savings account that’s earmarked specifically for home repairs and maintenance.

Many people don’t like the idea of cash “sitting” in their savings account, earning a return that’s so low it can’t even keep pace with inflation. I’d rather forgo some returns so that I can sleep at night. The water heater can burst at 2 a.m., or the dishwasher can overflow, ruining the carpet, or any number of other things can go wrong. When that happens, I like knowing that I can write a check to cover the bill, without breaking a sweat.

Property Management

This tip applies only to rental properties, of course.

Management usually costs 100 percent of the first month’s rent (for each new tenant), followed by an ongoing 8 to 10 percent fee. In addition, managers may charge extra fees for eviction proceedings, nuisance inspections and other additional work.

Sure, you can manage it yourself — but this takes time, and time is money. If you manage it yourself, you should pay yourself. You can’t pay yourself $0 and pretend your “profits” are higher — that’s B.S. accounting. “Make a profit AFTER paying yourself.” (That way, you can remove yourself from the equation and the numbers will stay the same.)

How to Track Your Expenses

Okay, we’ve talked about the expenses. But how can you keep track of all of this? Are you going to have a closet that’s overflowing with receipts?

Nope. Here’s a ridiculously simple way to track your rental expenses: (1) Open a separate bank account that’s only for rental property income and expenses. (2) Open a small business card, and set it up to automatically pay-in-full every month from your business bank account. Get one that offers either cashback or airline miles, so that you can fund your next vacation from the bills you need to pay anyway. (3) Make sure that all your rent payments get deposited in this account — never in your personal account. (4) Make sure that all rental expenses get paid from this credit card — never from your personal card. (5) Link both accounts to bookkeeping software.

And that’s it! Tracking expenses is mostly automatic, as long as you set up the right systems at the beginning.

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Posted in: Real EstateTagged in: cardratings, cost, how much does it cost to maintain a house, maintain a house, mortgage, mortgage calculator, taxes, trash, water

18 Comments
Leave a Comment
  1. Dr Dean

    # January 29, 2012 at 9:24 pm

    Looks like a good comprehensive examination of owning rental property. Some of the expenses are very difficult to project. One of the many reasons owning rental property can be such a hassle.

    Reply ↓
    • AffordAnything.org

      # February 3, 2012 at 12:30 pm

      @Dr. Dean — It’s nice to keep a solid margin of error. If you’re looking at a property that — in the most-likely-case-scenario — will cash flow $100 a month, I’d skip over it. Even a slight miscalculation (an insurance rate hike, a water rate hike) could put that property into negative-cash-flow zone. I usually do 3 calculations: best-case, medium-case and worst-case scenario. If the worst-case scenario still leaves a little margin-of-error wiggle room, then I’ll go for it. Otherwise, I’ll skip it.

      Reply ↓
  2. Michelle

    # February 3, 2012 at 12:16 pm

    Wow water is expensive for you! We pay around $55 every THREE months. I guess I’ve been taking our low rates for granted!

    Reply ↓
    • AffordAnything.org

      # February 3, 2012 at 12:24 pm

      @Michelle — My goodness, the water/sewage rates in Atlanta are insanely expensive. The neighboring county (DeKalb Co., Georgia) mandates, by law, that each household have 1.6 gallon-per-minute toilets or else they’ll cut off water supply to your house. Isn’t that crazy? I’ve never heard of that. I guess the drought here has been pretty bad for the past few years ….

      Reply ↓
    • David @ VapeHabitat

      # August 15, 2018 at 11:24 am

      We have a filter for rainwater and tank to store it. We pay $10/month

      Reply ↓
  3. Alok

    # February 3, 2012 at 12:57 pm

    Great post. In our rental property agreements, we add a clause that requires the tenant to pay the first $50 of damages each month (no rollovers) — it’s not about saving money but, instead, making sure the tenant has some skin in the game for maintaining the property. This clause has definitely reduced the number of calls we receive for small items and we’ve found that tenants are OK with the clause once you explain the rationale.

    Reply ↓
  4. maria@moneyprinciple

    # February 4, 2012 at 2:47 pm

    This is a very good and very useful breakdown of costs. I recently met a young woman who claimed that water is free; she just hadn’t realised exactly how much and what bills she pays every month.

    Reply ↓
  5. Jim

    # February 8, 2012 at 9:30 am

    I’d thought about buying rental properties before and I never knew when to budget for in terms of repairs & maintenance, I’d always heard horror stories about renters trashing places… 1% for repairs seems reasonable though, if you don’t use it, you can roll it over to the next renter.

    In terms of the management company vs. yourself, how much time do you estimate you spend managing the property? The standard rate appears to be 10% here.

    Reply ↓
    • AffordAnything.org

      # February 9, 2012 at 3:38 pm

      @Jim — The standard rate in my area is also 10 percent of the monthly rent, plus the first month’s rent of any given lease. If your property manager signs the tenants to a standard one-year lease, that means you pay 1/12 of the rental income upfront, plus 10 percent ongoing. If they sign a tenant to a 2-year lease, though, you only pay 1/24 th of the rental income upfront, with the same 10 percent ongoing!

      Reply ↓
  6. Tammy

    # February 25, 2016 at 7:22 pm

    I would like to congratulate you. amzing blog.
    Thanks for posting.

    Reply ↓
  7. Will

    # June 17, 2017 at 6:00 pm

    Your blog was right to the point. Thanks for creating it. It’s been a huge help as I’m looking to buy/rent a home very soon.

    Reply ↓
  8. Brianne MacLellan

    # July 28, 2017 at 7:18 pm

    Hi,

    I love your blog!
    How do you keep up with what needs repairs/replacements and how often? Do property management companies help with that?

    Reply ↓
  9. Elizabeth

    # August 23, 2017 at 1:30 pm

    Hmm, I wonder how your “1 percent of purchase price per year” rule applies in highly inflated markets? I live in the Seattle area, and wishing I could, within the next few years, spend in the neighborhood of $600,000 on a very modest home. A mid-range “family” home runs over $800,000 currently. Would maintenance costs keep pace with the higher purchase prices? Possibly, since everything here from onions to shoes costs way more than in the rest of the country…especially anything involving labor… but, should it really cost 3 or 4 times as much to maintain the same home here vs. the Midwest or the South?

    Reply ↓
  10. Tara

    # March 23, 2019 at 12:06 am

    My husband and I are about to become home owners of a livable fixer upper. Very good deal. We have terrible credit and all due to doctor bills. We hope we can use this fixer upper to get a loan from a bank for a decent home and then rent this fixer upper out to help pay off the loan. 🙂 this will be our first home and the info you gave is very informative and helpful thank you.

    Reply ↓
  11. Tyler Johnson

    # May 29, 2019 at 11:13 am

    That’s good to know that you could save some money by renting a dumpster rather than having one provided by the city. I would think that the city dumpsters wouldn’t be big enough for several families living in a single building. I’ll have to consider renting a dumpster if I decide to build some apartments to rent out.

    Reply ↓

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