This guest post is from William Cowie, who has contributed to Get Rich Slowly and other personal finance blogs. He also blogs about investing and offers a free Investing Basics course on Bite the Bullet Investing.
Everywhere you look, the story’s the same: the value of your house is going up. The National Association of Realtors [...]

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While cleaning out some old bookmarks, I ran across a link to one of Ron Lieber’s articles on home buying from back in 2009. In it, he discusses seven rules for first-time homebuyers. And even though the article is a few years old, it’s still relevant.
Start with the basics
For starters, put 20% down on your [...]

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I wasn’t exactly born yesterday. But among the misty watercolor memories clouding my brain pan, I retain a clear memory of the kind of homes that many middle-class people lived in way back in my 1960s-era childhood.
They often were very small. Three tiny bedrooms, a phonebooth sized bathroom, a kitchen just larger than a card [...]

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As with so many other things, the world of real estate tends to move in cycles. For proof, just look at the markets for single-family homes and apartments.
It wasn’t that many years ago that every American was buying a home. If you didn’t own a home, people demanded to know why. What were you waiting [...]

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This is a guest post from Sarah Gilbert.
The story of one mortgage
I got my mortgage statement in the mail a few weeks ago. I bought my Portland, Oregon home 10 years ago on a busy street in an up-and-coming neighborhood with what I thought was a super-low interest rate: 5.25%. It was a five-year ARM, [...]

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If you need to move but don’t want to sell your home, you have other options. The rental market has been heating up, and rents have been keeping up with (if not outpacing) inflation, rising almost 3% annually around the country. Renting your home instead of selling it may be a great way to make [...]

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Over the weekend, I had an epiphany. My wife and I were talking about our investments when I lamented that I wish I had the temperament for investing in rental properties, but… I just can’t handle dealing with other people’s incompetence.
And there, in a single sentence, I summed up the conflicted feelings about real estate [...]

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My job is requiring me to move to a new town. So, my wife and I are faced with what seems to recently be the newest typical American family dilemma. What should we do with the home that we bought almost four years ago? While it can be hard to figure out whether to buy [...]

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The latest news on the mortgage front is that Bank of America is testing a new program where they turn (former) homeowners into renters. Yes, really. It’s called the “Mortgage to Lease” program and it aims to convert those who are behind on their mortgages into leasees.
When I first hear this news, I was blown [...]

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I’ve written in the past about how I think you should own your investments and rent your fun. I mostly think about this when it comes to vacation properties, but it can be applied equally well to things like boats and other major “big boy toys.”
Over the weekend, we nailed down our Spring Break plans. [...]

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