Purchasing a home is a big deal, and for many people, buying a first home is an achievement many years in the making. You’ve saved up for the down payment, worked through all of the financial and legal paperwork and finally got the keys in your hand – now what? In all of the excitement of buying your first home, it can be easy to get lost in the details, but the good news is that there are a few things you can do right after purchasing your first home to make the transition to homeowner easier.
Inspect Everything
You probably had an inspection performed before you bought your home, and you also likely had an appraisal completed as part of your seller’s agreement. Pre-sale inspections and appraisals catch a lot of things like repairs and upgrades that need to be completed, but they don’t always catch everything. You need to spend some time going over every nook and cranny of your new home to look for issues that need to be addressed. When you find and fix issues, create and maintain a home maintenance record to document repairs and upgrades.
Introduce Yourself To Your Neighbors
If your new home is in a neighborhood or has neighbors close by, make it a point to introduce yourself once you’ve gotten settled in a bit. There are a number of benefits that come along with knowing your neighbors, including safer communities and peace of mind. You don’t have to become best friends with your new neighbors, but it will benefit you and your community to at least know who lives next door and what they’re like.
This will make it much easier to get along if you find out that your neighbor has a barking dog or doesn’t cut their grass all summer long. The goal is to be able to approach your neighbor in a friendly way to resolve issues together, and the first step in doing this is to introduce yourself. You never know – you may strike up a friendship after all.
Change the Locks
It would also be a good idea to change the locks on your new home shortly after moving in. The fact is that you simply don’t know who has keys to your home, and while realtors usually do a good job of securing properties and protecting keys from unauthorized duplication, it’s better to be safe than sorry.
When you change the locks on your new home, you don’t have to junk the old locks and keys. Instead, consider placing them on interior doors or saving them in case you need them for interior doors in the future. As long as the locks are still in good condition, they can be reused in a place where they aren’t accessible to anyone who may have had a duplicate key.
Update Your Address On Everything
One of the most important and yet overlooked tasks that needs to be performed after moving into your new home is to update your address with relevant parties. Depending on your age and life experience, there can be so many places that will need to be updated with your new address, and failure to update your address can lead to delayed mail deliveries, unpaid bills and more.
Make a list of all of the places that you corresponded with at your old address. This list can include everything from employers to insurance companies to your child’s piano teacher. Thankfully, you can update your address online for most accounts within minutes, and the post office can usually forward mail from your old address in the event that you left someone out while updating.
