Thefts from the houses of sports stars Ketel Marte, Travis Kelce, Patrick Mahomes and Rob Gronkowski should raise the hackles of every homeowner -- celebrity or not.

These players were away for several days at the time when the burglaries occurred, rendering their places more vulnerable. But homes are susceptible to break-ins at any time -- whether we are on vacation, at work, out for the evening or still inside.

Fortunately, burglars tend to go out of their way to avoid bumping into occupants. Indeed, many will either abandon a robbery attempt or hide to avoid discovery when they hear someone in the house (or returning home). They sometimes case their targets several times to make sure they don’t meet anyone inside.

The trick, then, is to make your home appear occupied -- even when it isn’t.

Many homeowners install expensive alarm systems or keep a gun in the nightstand. But alarms only work once the intruder breaks a window or blasts through a door. An experienced thief can be in and out in five minutes, whereas the police often take four times that long. And a gun only works if you are home, awake, alert and trained -- and also if you have the gun handy, and loaded, at the crucial moment.

While there’s nothing wrong with taking those precautions, simply adding lights to your property may prove to be a better deterrent. Some bad guys operate during daytime hours, but most prefer the cover of darkness. So light things up.

To make it less obvious your place is empty, set up nightlights and timer-controlled lights throughout your home. This one step can give the impression that someone is inside. Program your lights to turn on in various rooms at different times to mimic regular activity. To guard against power outages, consider solar timers.

Leave the light above your kitchen range on at all times. The kitchen is one room that tends to have lights on the most. Put your TV on a timer so it goes off and on in the afternoon and evening, or leave a radio on. Tune it to a talk station, as opposed to music, because the pattern of human speech is more consistent with someone being home.

Outside lights are an important protective barrier, too. They should be on motion sensors so they turn on when someone approaches, and mounted high enough so they can’t be reached without a ladder. While some thieves are high-wire aerialists, most know that putting up a ladder after the sun goes down is too conspicuous.

Also, trim your shrubs back from the walls of your house so intruders can’t hide behind them and peer through your windows to determine if anyone is actually home.

Dogs also are a great deterrent -- especially big, loud ones who bark at the slightest sound outside. Thieves don’t like running into unfriendly dogs any more than humans. Absent a real dog, though, consider playing a recording of a dog growling and barking. Not constantly, but programmed so that a woof or two is heard every few minutes. Maybe the audio could be triggered by motion or noise outside.

Also, secure all potential entry points. We not only lock our garage doors every night, for example, but also the door from the garage into the house itself. And that’s on top of a monitored security system.

Lock all your windows, not just those on the ground floor. And reinforce your doorframes so your deadbolt lock goes deep. That way, an intruder will have less success putting a shoulder to the door or kicking it in.

Don’t leave spare keys outside; burglars already know the best hiding places. And don’t leave your valuables lying around where they can be spotted through a window. Put your wallet, purse, watch and jewelry away when you walk in the door. Leaving them on the table or kitchen counter is an open invitation.

If you still have a landline, turn down your phone’s ringer so a long series of unanswered rings doesn’t draw attention. Your voicemail message should be along the lines of, “We can’t come to the phone right now,” rather than, “We’re out of town, but will call you back Tuesday!”

Speaking of being out of town, if you are away for more than a night or two, consider either hiring a house sitter or asking a neighbor to check on your place every day. If you plan to be gone for an extended period, hire someone to visit your house periodically to make sure it has not been visited by any unwanted guests. They should also make sure that the heat or air conditioning systems are working properly and that there are no plumbing leaks.

Don’t advertise that you are away, either. Don’t post online that you are having a wonderful time in Greece, and don’t send back photos for your friends and family. Save the “how I spent my vacation” slideshow for after you return.

Unfortunately, none of these steps stop crime; that’s impossible. But they can make it less likely that a robbery will happen to you. Make it difficult, and a thief is likely to move on to the next house.

Remember, robbers are a lazy bunch. They tend to go for the low-hanging fruit.

The complaints about contractors hired to do work around people's homes are legion. They go something like this:

"The guy I hired to remodel my kitchen was never on time, didn’t even show up for several days, and took forever to finish."

"Yeah? Well, my contractor never finished the job at all; I had to get somebody else."

"You think that’s bad? My contractors did the work, but they did it all wrong. I had to hire someone else to rip out what they did and start over."

Yes, these kinds of things do happen. But contractors and tradespeople have tales of their own to tell. From their point of view, it’s not always their fault when things don’t go smoothly.

Take the guy who said he usually starts work at 7:30 a.m., but was asked by the homeowners at one job if he could begin at 9:30 instead. The contractor agreed, but when he arrived at that time, he was asked to come back between 10:30 and 11. Again, he agreed, even though he'd lost almost half a day’s work at that point.

When he showed up the second time, “everyone was still getting out of bed," he said, and the room he was supposed to work in was full of stuff, including the bed. Two days later, the bed had yet to be moved, plus the owner’s dogs were running around the contractor as he tried to work, he said.

When he finally finished this “nightmare of a job,” the owner made him wait another week to be paid.

So, sure -- there are a lot of lousy tradespeople out there, and you should do your best to sniff them out before signing a contract. But many contractors believe homeowners are the reason projects become problems. And some think it's gotten worse since the pandemic.

“Since COVID,” one contractor posted on Reddit last year, “customers are becoming increasingly just awful people.” He said he'd been on a run of crummy customers and called the experiences “exhausting.”

Dozens of fellow tradespeople commented on the post, most of them agreeing with the exhausted contractor.

One commenter wrote that the pandemic “gave people too much time on Pinterest and HGTV. All those remodel shows that edit a four-month gut job into 45 minutes (give people) a warped sense of reality and completely unreasonable expectations.”

Of course, the contractor should set the rules before a contract is signed: They should explain the process to the homeowner from beginning to end, including permitting, demolition, reconstruction and possible changes. They should also discuss how to bring up concerns when the project doesn’t seem to be going right.

But that doesn’t seem to register with some clients. One landscaper had a customer who walked around the yard with a tape measure to make sure the new flower beds were "exactly, to the inch, the size they were drawn on the plan." But “this isn’t carpentry,” said the landscaper. “I am digging dirt.”

One contractor said some of their clients seem fine during the planning stages, but as soon as construction begins, "all hell breaks loose." They said clients often "delay decisions that extend the project timeline and then act like it’s our fault the project is taking longer."

Another worker told of the homeowner who taped down all four toilets in her house and placed signs on them that read "DO NOT USE." The contractor had to rent a portable toilet for the workers for the duration of the project.

Other contractors complained of being micromanaged.

“Nobody leaves their houses anymore, so they are always in your business,” one posted. “Every job this year has been 100% ‘owner-occupied’ for us.”

“I don’t know where these people come from," posted another. "It’s like they expect you not to make a living, do an incredible job, give them more than they paid for and then be grateful they didn't yell at you to tear it all out.”

Many contractors have learned to nip that sort of thing in the bud. Call it bad-client radar, or just listening to your gut.

Said one, "I’ve walked away from three quotes this year because the alarms were screaming at me" that the clients would be awful to work with.

"When I go (to) bid (on) a job," one contractor noted, "I’m also interviewing the customer, for things like: Are they going to be watching me the entire time I work? Are they going to nitpick every little detail in (the) material they picked out? Are they going to change their minds 100 times?” They said they either raise prices to reflect annoying customers or flat-out refuse the job.

Another says they do a full background check, including social media, on all potential new clients: “They do the same on us, so I feel it’s totally fair.”

And if things go south after the work commences, some tradespeople aren’t afraid to walk away. Some use the "I think it's best if we part ways" approach, while others just cancel contracts midstream.

“I’ve had to fire two customers this year,” one contractor posted. “Overbearing, picky and obsessive.”

There comes a time in practically every homeowner's life when they consider using the equity they've built up in their house for one purpose or another.

Perhaps it's to pay for their kid's higher education. Maybe they want to enlarge the place to accommodate a new arrival. Or maybe they lost their job, have no immediate prospects for a new one, and need some cash to tide them over.

Typically, homeowners in these situations would turn to home equity loans or lines of credit. But a relatively new type of financial instrument, the home equity contract, is growing in popularity.

Proponents say that HECs, sometimes known as home equity investments, involve no monthly payments and are not even considered debt. But federal regulators are taking a hard look at these tools and are warning consumers to do the same.

“Home equity contracts carry features that echo some of the risky loan structures that were common in the lead-up to the 2008 housing crisis,” reads a January report from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

If nothing else, HECs are expensive, even compared to other home-secured finance options. They may require consumers to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars at the end of their loan terms, depending largely on how much their homes have appreciated over that time.

HECs are deals in which homeowners receive an up-front payment that must be repaid at the end of a predetermined term -- usually somewhere from 10 to 30 years -- or when they sell or move out of the home. Owners retain the right to occupy their places and are still responsible for all the ongoing expenses, including taxes, maintenance and insurance.

Only about 40,000 or so HECs have been written to date, mostly by just four companies. But the market is said to be growing, with more deals originating every month.

Each company’s products are similar, but they differ in the fine print, making it difficult to comparison-shop. So far, consumer complaints about HECs to the CFPB have been limited, but the financial watchdog agency has its eyes on the business.

“Overall,” the agency says, “the lack of adequate understanding among consumers about home equity contracts, their complex terms, non-standardization in disclosures and other issues may prevent consumers from recognizing the true financing costs and risks of these products.”

One of the problems is that most HECs on the market don't have income or employment requirements. Nor do they require high credit scores. The companies offering HECs emphasize the large, up-front cash payments and the speed of funding. They also stress that no interest is charged, no monthly payments are necessary and that the deal is not a loan -- and is therefore technically not debt.

But it is debt in the sense that, eventually, it must be paid back -- and it's often an exorbitant amount you may not be able to afford, even if you sell your house at a profit.

Here’s a look at some of the key features of HECs:

-- The amount you receive up-front is based on how much equity you currently have in your property. You are responsible for paying any closing costs, including processing fees, to the HEC company, and for covering third-party costs like appraisal and recording fees.

-- The more your place appreciates, the more you’ll have to pay back. And the house’s starting value is often discounted, sometimes by as much as 25%. The payoff, then, would be the difference between the discounted starting value and the final (undiscounted) value, as determined by an appraisal at that time.

-- HEC companies generally require to be paid back a multiple of their initial payment. For example, if you receive a payment worth 10% of your home’s current value, the HEC company may demand to be repaid 20% of its value on the back end -- meaning "the company would double their money before factoring in any home price appreciation," writes the CFPB.

-- Some companies credit you for home improvements that increase its value, but others do not. And when the house is sold, the owner is solely responsible for all selling costs.

-- Some companies use rate caps to limit how quickly the repayment amount can grow. While they are marketed as a consumer protection, "rate caps are mathematically equivalent to a maximum interest rate on the initial payment to the homeowner," the CFPB says.

Here’s a simplified example of a typical HEC from the consumer watchdog agency: Say your house is worth $500,000, and you get a cash payment of 10% of that ($50,000). In exchange, the company takes a 20% interest in the house. The contract has a 20% annual return cap. You have a 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage at 4%; there are 25 years to go and a $300,000 balance.

You're responsible for the HEC transaction fees -- 4% would be a typical rate, which equates to $2,000 -- and third-party fees, which could easily be another $2,000. So right off the bat, your proceeds are reduced by $4,000.

Let’s say the house appreciates at 6% a year, which is a tad higher than the historical average. If you sell your place in three years, you’ll owe the HEC company $86,400. That's the equivalent of having gotten a zero-payment loan with an annual rate of 20%.

If you wait 10 years to sell, you’ll owe a whopping $179,085.

Because the company’s returns are boosted by the discounted initial value of the house and by the multiplier, the odds are stacked against you. And if your contract period runs out and you cannot pay in full, in a single lump sum, you could be forced to sell your place.