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One excellent way to improve your financial profile is to buy a home of your own. But we won’t lie: It’s a long and potentially incredibly stressful process, especially when it comes to the dollars and cents of securing a mortgage loan.

One of the very best things about owning your own home is that you can change it to fit yourself and your lifestyle. Home renovations are more popular than ever before, and there are countless shows, blogs, magazines and other resources where you can indulge your dreams of…

Not too long ago in our country's history, talking about making your house "greener" might get you labeled a hippie tree-hugger. But times change, and as gas, electricity, and water prices creep up, more and more homeowners are seeing the (strong) advantages that come with…

Real estate investing is gaining popularity, and if you’ve been giving it some thought, this guide will give you an overview. The goal of any real estate investor is typically to make money. This means purchasing an investment property at a good price so you can rent it…

Buying a house - whether it’s your first or fifth - can be a bumpy process. Between the financing, the availability (or scarcity) of homes on the market in your price range that meet your needs, the offer process, the appraisal and the inspection, there’s a lot that can…

One way to know whether you've got a good agent (or not) is to consider some of the tasks and activities that a really good agent will manage for a client, then apply what you've learned to your own agent. If you don't have time to track down all of the things that a good…

When you’re selling a luxury property, the usual rules about how to market a home tend to go out the window. For starters, not all sellers want the universe to know that their home is going on the market, so you might not have the option of advertising the home on a real…

Like so many things in life, it’s not what you know; it’s who you know. Some homeowners take years to get all of these names and numbers in their mental address books or their smartphones, but if you start trying to find these essential people in your homeowners’…

An open house can be an ideal way to introduce a bulk of buyers to the property you're hoping to sell them, and done right, an open house can sometimes generate multiple offers. The key, though, is "done right" -- not every open house is going to be a buyer's bonanza, and…

Buying a home is always an anxiety-ridden process, and that goes triple for anyone who’s embarking on homeownership for the very first time. There’s so much to do and so much you don’t know that “overwhelming” hardly seems like an appropriate description of how it…

If you've never owned a house before, then it's entirely possible that you've never deep-cleaned a house. (Hey, no shame in that game.) But when the house is yours, the desire to see it as clean and sparkling as it can possibly be is strong -- and you might have no idea…