Owning a home is one of the largest investments most people will ever make. It is also, as I learned firsthand, one of the least understood sources of legal risk in ordinary life.

My name is Harry Cornish. I have owned several homes over the course of my life, and this guide & program exists because of what those years taught me about the legal exposure that comes with homeownership - exposure that most owners never see coming.

For the first thirteen or fourteen years of owning my second home, I gave little thought to the legal dimension of ownership. That changed when my first wife passed away from cancer. We had two children together, and in the midst of that loss, I discovered we had never put a will in place. That omission alone required me to retain an attorney to represent my children's interests in the property when it eventually sold. A document that should have cost under a hundred dollars to prepare in advance ended up costing several thousand after the fact, simply because it had been left undone.

That experience made clear to me how much difference a small amount of legal preparation can make, and how expensive its absence can be.

Some years later, I purchased a home in a different subdivision, largely to place my children in a stronger school district. I had barely settled in before discovering the extent of authority the homeowners' association held over how I could use and maintain a property I alone was financing. Managing that relationship became a recurring feature of owning that home.

Repairs brought their own set of lessons. After a storm moved through the area, a roofing contractor approached me about damage to my shingles. We agreed on a price and a scope of work, but as the project progressed, concerns about the quality of the work led to a serious dispute between us. Weeks later, another storm exposed the consequence: water was leaking into my kitchen ceiling. When I contacted the contractor to make it right, he stopped responding. He had been readily available to collect payment; he was nowhere to be found when the work needed to be corrected. I ultimately paid to repair the damage myself.

That situation, and others like it involving contractors, friends, and even family members, taught me the same lesson from a different angle: good intentions and informal understandings are not sufficient protection. Without a clear, written agreement addressing not only the scope of work but also responsibility for correcting problems after the fact, even parties who trust one another can end up in disputes that damage both the relationship and the finances of everyone involved.

I have also seen how quickly a shift in broader economic conditions, such as the disruption of 2020, can place a homeowner in a position they never anticipated - facing a sale under pressure, with little financial preparation for the transition that follows.

Reflecting on these experiences, I came to a clear conclusion: none of them were unusual, extreme, or rare. They were the ordinary risks that accompany homeownership - risks that are entirely manageable when addressed in advance, and considerably more costly when they are not. The real expense in each case was not the legal problem itself, but the absence of preparation for it.

I am not an attorney. I am a homeowner who has navigated a number of properties and a number of avoidable legal and financial setbacks, and I wrote this guide to share what those experiences taught me, so that other homeowners can address these risks before a disagreement becomes a dispute.

What follows are 20 of the legal problems homeowners encounter most often, what they typically look like in practice, and the steps you can take now to reduce your risk before a disagreement becomes a dispute.