Buying A Home

Your Real Estate team

You don't have to become an expert in property values, mortgages, tax and real estate law, title insurance, escrow, pest-control work, and construction techniques in order to play the house-buying game well. Instead, you can hire people who've already mastered the skills that you lack. Home buying is a team sport. Your job is to lead and coach the team, not play every position. After you assemble a winning team, your players should give you solid advice so you can make brilliant decisions.

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Advantages of Buying

Our goals are simple -- to ensure that you're happy with the home you buy, that you get the best deal you can, and that owning the home helps you to accomplish your financial goals. Most people should eventually buy homes, but not everyone and not at every point in their lives. To decide whether now's the time for you to buy a house, consider the advantages of buying and whether they apply to you.

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Preparing to Shop

When you're under contract to buy a property, having your mortgage application denied (after waiting several weeks) may cause you to lose the property after having spent hundreds of dollars on loan fees and property inspections. Even worse, you may lose the home that you've probably spent countless hours searching for and a great deal of emotional energy to secure. Some house sellers won't be willing to wait or may need to sell quickly.

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Making an Offer

After you find your dream home, you're ready for the next action step in the negotiating process -- making an offer to purchase. No standard, universally accepted real estate purchase contract is used throughout the country. On the contrary, purchase contracts vary in length and terms from state to state and, within a state, from one locality to another. A good agent or lawyer will use the most current version of the contract.

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Inspections and Insurance

A home's physical condition greatly affects its value. You'd feel horrible if you paid top dollar for a home that you thought was in tip-top shape and then discovered after you bought it that the house was riddled with expensive defects. And yet, unless you're a professional property inspector, you probably won't have the faintest idea how much corrective work a house needs simply by looking at it.

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Closing the Deal

You may believe that the most important piece of paper you get when closing is the deed to your new home. From an accounting standpoint, however, the most important piece of paper is the final closing statement that you get on the day that your home actually closes.

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After You Buy

Most homebuyers can find unlimited furniture, appliances, and remodeling projects. Because of these spending temptations, more than a few homebuyers end up not saving any of their hard-earned incomes. Some new homeowners even end up building credit card consumer debt because their spending outstrips their income.

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