Stop waiting for an emergency to upgrade your home's tech - there's a better way

PM Images/Getty Images Key takeaways: 77% of surveyed homeowners recently installed a major system or are planning the next one. More than half of heating and cooling systems are replaced only after failing. 88% of households considering energy upgrades are looking at technology other than solar. Soon after becoming a homeowner for the first time, many of us face a fraternity-like initiation into what I've come to refer to as the "recurring one-time" (ROT) expense. Those pesky (and sometimes crippling) expenditures that, when viewed on their own, seem like one-and-done costs of homeownership that won't resurface for years, if ever. However, zooming out to a wider time frame quickly reveals how these unrelated costs can fuse together into an unavoidably recurring chain. Also: The best home EV chargers: Expert tested A nonfunctional garbage disposal prompts a call to an electrician who instantaneously diagnoses the problem as a tripped breaker on the disposal itself that you didn' ... Read full article.