20 "Poor Man" Fixes That Beat Every $5,000 System I Ever Wrote a Check On

For thirty one years I was a home insurance claims adjuster in Ohio. I walked into about four thousand houses the morning after somebody got in, with a clipboard and a camera, and wrote down how it happened and what it cost. In April of two thousand six I stood in a kitchen on Conwell Avenue in Willard and wrote down a number that did not make sense to me for years. Arlene, a retired schoolteacher, had spent eleven dollars on her house that year. Nobody ever came through her door. Four houses down, a man had spent two thousand nine hundred on a system with a keypad, a yard sign and two cameras, and they got in twice. It took me another decade of files to understand why. These are the twenty fixes I kept finding in the houses that never came across my desk. Not one of them is a product, and not one of them costs more than about forty dollars. WHAT IS ON THIS LIST Loose gravel under the ground-floor windows · a motion light that replaces the porch bulb with no wiring · shrubs trimmed below the sill line · a stick-on alarm on the one window that never gets latched · the ladder that lives chained instead of leaning · a hold on the mail · a motion chime on the side gate · a lamp timer that does not fire at the same minute every night · a worn dog bowl and a chain by a back door with no dog behind it · the second car in the driveway · delivery boxes flattened before they go out · blinds that do not sit in the same position for a week · the two minute walk before bed · the garage remote that does not live on the visor · covers on the basement window wells · the branch that reaches an upstairs window · the trip you post about after you are home · a ten dollar door wedge alarm · a spare bulb for the motion light · and the one I found more than any other, which is number one.