Nobody forgets the mortgage. Almost everybody forgets the gutters, and the gutters are the one that ends up costing money.
The problem is timing, not laziness
House jobs do not arrive on a schedule you would notice. They arrive when a season turns, or when a certain number of months has passed since the last time you did them. Neither of those puts anything in your calendar, so the job surfaces as a leak rather than a reminder.
The seasonal ones
These land on roughly the same month every year. Air conditioning wants servicing before the first hot week rather than during it, when every engineer in the county is already booked. Gutters want clearing in spring, once the winter debris has finished falling, and again in autumn after the trees are done. Heating wants checking before you need it, not on the first cold night.
The interval ones are worse
Because they move. Filters, smoke alarm batteries, water softener salt, boiler servicing: each is counted forward from the last time it was done, so they drift through the year and never settle on a date you would think to check. Miss one cycle and the next one is already late.
Write down what you paid
This is the half people skip. Knowing a job got done is mildly useful. Knowing it was done in March, cost a specific amount, and by whom is what turns a shoebox of receipts into an argument you can actually win, whether that is with a contractor who says he already replaced it or an insurer who says you did not maintain it.
Set it up once
The whole thing only works if you do the thinking once and then stop. Every job sitting on the month it belongs in, the interval jobs counting themselves forward, and a note against each of what it cost.
HomeKeep is an Android app built around that idea. Tell it whether the house is American or British and which systems it has, and it loads the maintenance list for that home and drops each job into the month it belongs in, then remembers what you paid and who did it.
