Can You Afford a Wet Basement?

We all know a wet basement is a hassle and something one wants to think about or deal with unless it is strictly necessary.

As a homeowner, if you have one, you avoid going there as much as possible and you try not to think about it until the heavy rain season arrives. Then you lose your sleep over it,  and you dread at the possibility of waking up  to a flooded basement. 

I am also pretty sure many of my friends in the Real Estate community had to deal with it while working in the field. Listing or showing a home with a wet basement is not something many look forward to.

Let he or she, who never felt awkward having to introduce a buyer who is in love with that "oh-so-perfect" listing, to its wet, dingy, cave- like basement, cast the first stone. Wet basements are that dirty and not so little secret we wish we could hide but we can't. 

What very few people know is that they are actually more than that. They are an ongoing burden on your finances. In other words, when you do the math, keeping a wet basement is more expensive than having it fixed. 

Wet basements make your home harder to cool and heat, they ruin your indoor air quality, they have the potential to cause serious structural damage, decrease property value and can render a home hard or impossible to sell.

All that still does not include the millions of dollars in lost property and damages caused by basement floods, which as not covered by typical homeowners insurance and might not even be covered by flood insurance policies, as there are coverage limitations for basement floods. 

I recently wrote an article discussing the many ways in which a wet basement is wasting your money and damaging your property I suggest you look into for more information. 

The good news is that all these problems can be effectively avoided for a fraction of the cost you are paying for not having your basement fixed. 

Modern interior drainage and sump pump systems will fix basement leaks and will reduce the chances of a basement flood to statistical insignificance. They can be installed with minimal disruption, in just a couple of days on average.

It is so easy to fix a leaky basement these days, it really surprises me that people will cope with wet basements for so many years, rather than seek a solution.