When it comes to buying a house, have you ever felt torn on whether you should buy old or new? There’s the one side, with the thought of purchasing a brand-new home that no one else has lived in. No hidden stains, no rusted pipes, no lingering odors. Then there’s the other side, with the thought of purchasing an old home where others have made memories, created a homey atmosphere and left a piece of history behind for you to become part of. It’s a tough decision, so to help you make it, I am offering this article from TheDailyGreen.com.
This article suggests that you should purchase old homes in order to save precious wilderness that would otherwise be torn apart for building homes on. With so many homes available for purchase right now, why ruin extra land to buy new homes? It even suggests that you purchase old buildings that would otherwise be torn down. They could be renovated into museums, bed and breakfasts, offices, home businesses and other interesting entrepreneur ideas.
Take a look at the article and then decide what you think about purchasing old homes and buildings. Would it be worth the renovation? Do you agree or disagree with the idea? Let me know!
If you’re moving to a new city or town, you want to conduct intense research on the area before you start calling it home. Whether it’s a city of skyscrapers or a rural countryside, you want your home to be surrounded with a low crime rate, highly rated schools and nearby medical facilities. But there’s so much more to consider, such as the number of car accidents that occur on the local streets, the amount of employment that is available in the surrounding cities, the number of cell phone towers, the number of sex offenders and so much more! With everything considered, learning about a new town can become overwhelming.
Not anymore. With a couple clicks at City-Data.com, you can find out all of that and more about every city in the U.S. that has a population over 6,000! You can also look up recent home sales, home value estimators, maps, satellite photos and more. You can even find out if the city was the birthplace to anyone famous. This site has it all.
According to City-Data.com, it has been featured in 60 books and was mentioned on CNN and numerous local news stations. In one month alone, 11.7 millions web browsers visited this site to learn more about their city or a city that they were traveling or moving to. Join the millions as you check out recent news headlines and read recent forum posts written by people just like you. In about six minutes on this site, I tripled the knowledge that I contain on my own town!
It starts with your first apartment. You fill it with hand-me-downs and mismatched pieces you found at thrift stores, adding more and more as time goes on, until one day, you wake up and think you are outgrowing this shoebox of a one-bedroom, and you need more space. Then comes you next apartment, and your next, until you buy a home—your first big purchase of this kind, and you clean it and take care of it with pride because it’s yours. But eventually even that home becomes too small, or in the wrong location, or lacking in outdoor space. So you move up again, until you do it again. Along the way, there are always new decorating ideas to consider or new products to purchase or nicer neighborhoods to move to.
Sound familiar? For many Americans, this is the constant struggle of home ownership—wanting more. Some say it’s the reason mortgages got so out of control and the reason the real estate market has plummeted.
Regardless, there’s one valuable lesson to be learned from the always-wanting-more mindset: When it comes to buying a house, don’t overbuy.
Take Edmund Andrews, an economics reporter for the New York Times, who recently told about his own personal crisis of buying a house outside his means and then amassing large credit-card debt to try and keep up with payments. It’s a fascinating story and one that’s all too common.
from Chris Ayres, of the LA Times, in his “Loving Your House Again. On how today’s homeowners may be feeling, what with the bad market and lowered home values:
“Chances are, you feel like impaling yourself on the three-pointed star on your real estate agent’s Mercedes. Before you do that, however, consider inflation. At its current unbowdlerized rate of 5%, inflation alone will devalue your million-dollar loan over the next decade to the “real money” equivalent of about $600,000, while at the same time causing your home to appreciate to $1.3 million (according to online inflation calculators).”
In other words, buying a house is still a good decision, all things considered.
Read the rest of the article here.
In case you haven’t heard already, this is for you, first-time home buyers: the government wants to help you buy a house.
In fact, according to The Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008, it’s willing to give you a $7500 tax credit to sweeten the deal. This credit will be offered interest-free, to be paid back over 15 years.
Who qualifies?
New Home Buyers: To be considered a newbie, you can’t have owned a home within the last three years. For married taxpayers, neither spouse may have owned a primary residence in order for either to qualify.
How long will this last?
The house in question put be purchased between April 9, 2008 and July 1, 2009.
For more information, see article
“A different type of home loan, called a mortgage accelerator, has migrated to the United States. It uses home-equity borrowing and a borrower’s paychecks to shorten the time until a mortgage is paid off, potentially saving tens of thousands of dollars in interest expense.
Not to be confused with biweekly programs that shorten a mortgage through extra payments, the mortgage-accelerator program is based on an approach common in Australia and the United Kingdom, where borrowers deposit their paychecks into accounts that, every month, apply every unspent dime against the mortgage loan balances…
The premise is that borrowers finance a purchase or refinance existing property using home-equity lines of credit. Borrowers then directly deposit their entire paychecks into the credit accounts. Monthly expenses, other than mortgage payments, are funded by draws against the lines of credit, whether those are through automatic bill payments, checks, cash withdrawals or credit cards. Even if borrowers end up not paying anything extra on the principal during a month, they still capture some interest savings because the average balances are less than they would have been with conventional loans.”
(Taken from “A New Way to Pay off Your House” at MSN Money)
