Your home is one of the biggest investments you’ll ever own, and that makes it a key part of your financial plan.
As your home value changes and your mortgage balance decreases, equity in your home shifts and so does your net worth. Having equity can give you real options for your financial goals, like upgrading to a new home or downsizing to pad your retirement nest egg.
To know your equity you just need two numbers: your mortgage balance and the market value of your home. And while it’s easy to check your exact mortgage balance, figuring the market value of a home is trickier.
Add Some Zestimate® to Your Life Plan
Now BrightPlan makes it easy to track an estimate for your current home value by integrating with Zestimate from Zillow. With this integration, just plug your home address into BrightPlan and Zillow's estimated home value will automatically update on a regular basis.
The Zestimate is Zillow's estimated market value for a home and is calculated for about 100 million homes nationwide. Your Zestimate is automatically computed daily based on millions of public and user-submitted data points. No more time-consuming research. No more calls to local realtors. No more guesswork.
Of course, the Zestimate is only an estimate, and may be more or less accurate in your area. You can always overwrite the value with an estimate from your real estate agent or another expert in your local market.
How to Link Your Home Value in BrightPlan
To link your home value to BrightPlan, just follow these steps:
Step 1. From the Financial Accounts Dashboard create a Manual Account and select Real Estate.
Note: If you already created an account for your home in the past, don’t create a new one. Just edit the account with the steps below.
Step 2. Enter your address and select the “Use Zestimate for Home Value” box.
Step 3. BrightPlan will pull the current home value from Zillow and update it regularly along with the rest of your linked financial accounts.
Step 4. If you have a mortgage on your home, be sure to link it to BrightPlan to accurately reflect your home equity in your overall financial picture.
That’s it… easy, right? BrightPlan was created to make financial planning easy and automatic. Part of that is knowing exactly what you own and what you owe.
Now by integrating with Zillow, tracking your home value and equity position is automatic too. And that makes planning for your financial future hassle-free.
