4 Thinking Points Before Buying a HouseWritten by Roger Sorensen
So you’ve been renting an apartment for a while and your friends are all buying houses and settling down to nice, quiet suburban lifestyle. Is this something you should be doing too? To put even more pressure on you, every other evening news cast is talking about rapidly increasing value of houses in your area. Before you rush out and buy first house you can get a loan for, perhaps it would be wise to stop and decide if buying a house is really what you should be doing. To help you, here are four things to think about. 1. How long will you live there? If your job requires frequent moves, or you are pretty sure you will not be in same city in five years, do not buy a house. Real estate prices do sometimes dip and if you move you may have to sell your house at a loss. 2. Are you a Flipper? Flipping is art of buying a house, living in it for a time as you fix and improve it and then selling it for a profit. You then buy another house, live in it for a time, and sell it for a profit. The risk here is similar to that in previous paragraph; resale value of house may go down. So if you are going to be a flipper, be sure to buy a house you would want to live in for next ten years.
| | Avoid After Vacation StressWritten by Ida Byrd-Hill
Have you ever gone on a vacation and had a marvelous time only to feel stress later as you overspent????? Well, you are not alone. Many of us get so wrapped up in perfecting our tan or getting rest we need that we do not even want to think about how much we will be spending. ”Very few people, no matter what their net worth and level of their intelligence and financial savvy, do any kind of budgeting for trips,” said Gary Buffone, a psychologist and director of Family Business Center, in Jacksonville, Fla. as quoted in an article on www.cbs.marketwatch.com It stands to reason you take a vacation to relieve stress. Why would any sane person ruin euphoria of a vacation with mundane task of budgeting?The average family takes 2.6 trips annually according to YPB&R/Yankelovich National Travel & Leisure Monitor as quote by. The average cost for domestic vacations is $1000 with average cost for international vacations exceeding $3500. If average family takes 1.6 domestic vacations and 1 international vacation annually then they are spending at least $5000 on vacations a year. The cliché “Pay now or Pay later!” takes on a new meaning as you are paying by credit card later. When you add interest, cost to pay off these vacations grows to $9148.62. (Assumes 18% interest over 4 years) Add those cost over 4 years of vacations, credit card debt becomes astronomical. It is easy to see why average American family has a lot of credit card debt. The easiest way to eliminate this credit card debt is to not create debt at all or create a system to pay it off before you create it. Most people do neither creating stress after vacation. Budgeting makes most people revolt is it seems so complicated. Who wants to take time to perform mathematical calculations? No one. Ida Byrd-Hill, a 10 year veteran financial advisor has created a self calculating Vacation Budget Form. The form completes all calculations after you input basic information such a plan/train/ cruise ticket prices, number of nights and number of persons going on vacation. The form makes it easier to save for vacations as you will know true cost of vacation and whether you need to save some more money or allocate a larger portion on your credit cards. The best part you do not have to do complicated computations. The form is found at www.livinginstyleonline.com. Livinginstyleonline.com is a luxury lifestyle magazine and luxury discount shopping marketplace where motto is “you can live good life without breaking bank!!!!!!
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