10 Ways to Protect Your Home While on Vacation

Going on vacation is a fantastic time! The excitement and stress leading up to your departure can be intense, especially if you are going to be gone for an extended period or are traveling with children or seniors. To make leaving vacation even easier, I have created a list of the ten things I do to protect my home while I am on vacation every year. Hopefully, if you apply my tips you can enjoy your vacation more by ensuring your home is safe before you leave.

Every home has valuables. Not only should you lock up your expensive jewelry and cash, but also make sure your titles, deeds, birth certificates and other important information is locked up tight. It’s also important to make sure these items aren’t locked in a container or safe that can simply be carried out of a home.

Every home should have a safe to look up valuables and store important documents, check out the best home safes in the section below.

A few days before you leave for vacation, call your security company. Let them know you will be out of town and go over your contact list. This is the perfect time to change your contact list or update numbers, if necessary.

If you have neighbors, make sure you talk to them and let them know when you will be on vacation. If your neighbors are trustworthy people, leave your itinerary and contact information with them in case of emergency.

No one wants to come home to a lawn that needs to be mowed immediately, but it's important to mow your lawn for other reasons as well. If your lawn isn’t mowed, it may tip off would-be robbers that your house is currently empty.

Garage door openers are a great tool, and almost every home has one. However, when you are on vacation, you don’t need to leave your garage door openers in your car. Not only is leaving them in your car not a good idea, but it could also offer thieves an easy way to gain entry into your home unnoticed. Instead, lock your garage door openers at home out of sight and disable your garage door opener. After disabling your garage door opener, make sure to padlock it.

One of the biggest deterrents for thieves is when homeowners are at home. It’s easy to make your home look lived in by parking a car in the driveway, having lights on a timer, and making sure your mail is either on hold or being picked up by a friend or neighbor.

The best way to protect your home from costly damage or theft is to prevent something from occurring in the first place. One way to do this is to have someone check on your home while you are on vacation. Make sure to remind them to flip on lights, run water, and check for any damage when they visit your home.

Obviously, you should lock all the doors in your home, but do you know what else you should lock? You need to lock your windows, block doggie doors, prevent sliding glass doors from being pried open and make sure each and every window in your home is locked up tight.

You can never have too many locks on your doors, check out this selection of locks that are perfect for any home.

Right before you leave, make sure to unplug any unnecessary appliances. This includes your stove, microwave, TV, washer and dryer, and more. Doing this will reduce the amount of electricity your home uses while on vacation and can also help prevent an accidental fire too.

Personally, I love to post on social media. Whether I take a cute picture of my daughter or find a great sale on mustard, I’m probably going to post about it. However, in a day and age when we post information so freely, we often don’t think about the consequences of sharing such information. Since thieves can stalk your social media pages to find out whether you are home or not, it is a good idea to stay away from social media while on vacation. If you are going to post a picture or post a status, make sure you think about geotagging too. Geotagging automatically posts your location when you post to Facebook. If you must post a status or picture while on vacation, make sure to disable geotagging to help protect your home while you are away.

Get more details on how to protect your home from burglary in these YouTube videos.

Thanks for checking out my ten tips to keeping your home safe while on vacation. If you have a tip of your own, please feel free to add it in the comments below. I'd also welcome any stories that could help others stay safer too.