6 home renovations that ding your resale value

No Images? Click here   Did you know there’s a formula for how much is too much to spend on a kitchen renovation? I didn’t until this week, when Casey Bond rounded up home renovation projects that actually hurt your resale value. That’s one thing I love about this job: I’m always learning. Read on for more lessons, including how to embrace failure, ways to avoid being saddled with someone else’s debt, the most infuriating truth about your paycheck, and more.  One reminder: You may be funding the gun lobby without even knowing it. Here’s how to check your investments and what you can do if you want to divest.  Janie   Take back your life If you’ve never seen Bon Appétit’s video series “Gourmet Makes,” what are you doing with your life? In each episode, pastry chef Claire Saffitz is challenged to recreate a gourmet version of a beloved processed snack like Twinkies, Doritos, Twizzlers or Oreos, and each episode is a charming roller coaster of emotions, failures and jokes as Claire engineers a recipe on the spot through trial and error. Work/Life reporter Monica Torres summed up the major career lesson you can learn from watching, and it’s something Claire herself had to learn, too:  “‘Gourmet Makes’ has absolutely made me, a natural perfectionist, much more comfortable with failure. I think I grew up as a high-achieving person in a family where that was important and I looked at failure very, very negatively,” Saffitz said. “I have absolutely learned that you learn so much more from the failures than the successes.” Why you should embrace “intelligent failure”           Deal with it If you watch a lot of HGTV, you know people feel SUPER strongly about their kitchen spaces. But going too far with a kitchen remodel is bad, actually! According to real estate experts, it can hurt you in two ways when you try to sell your house: Buyers can be turned off by the quality disparity between your glam kitchen and the rest of your house, and it’s generally just hard to recoup the money if, say, you put a $100,000 kitchen in a $200,000 house. We asked them to share a list of the renos that come back to bite you when you try to sell your home. 6 home renovations that hurt your resale value Pro Tip: Think about whether you and your spouse should be listed as authorized users instead of joint cardholders when it comes to each other’s credit cards. That’s because, if the worst happens and one of you dies, the other could become responsible for the debt if listed as a co-signer or joint cardholder. (This is true regardless of whether they were the person who made the purchases or were paying the bill previously.) However, this is not the case for authorized users, who are not responsible for the debt in any situation. Read more about how it works in our primer about what happens to debt after a death. Want more practical magic? Don’t delay this awkward money talk with your aging parents  Having a white male advocate at work increases pay  How to resolve a dispute with your landlord How to get control of a parent’s social media page when they die    .     👋You may have noticed our website is now www.huffpost.com. Don't worry, it'll still be the same HuffPost you know and love, just with a new URL. Make sure to update your bookmarks!   HuffPost is now a part of Verizon Media Group. On May 25, 2018 we introduced a new Privacy Policy which will explain how your data is used and shared. Learn More. No moon dust. No B.S. Just a completely essential daily guide to achieving the good life. Subscribe here. Like what you see? Share it. Can't get enough? You'll also love HuffPost's Entertainment newsletter. ©2019 HuffPost | 770 Broadway, New York, NY 10003 You are receiving this email because you signed up for updates from HuffPost Feedback | Privacy Policy | Unsubscribe    . - - Preferences  |  Unsubscribe