How to Prepare Your Home for an Appraisal | Tips for Getting your Home Appraised

Tips to follow when getting your home ready for a Home Appraisal. After you’ve accepted an offer to sell your home, your property will be appraised to see if it’s worth what the buyer is offering. This appraisal is crucial to making sure the sale goes through smoothly. If it comes in too low, the
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Creative Ways to Avoid Paying Closing Costs

Here are a few creative ways to pay for your closing costs without waiting and saving even more. You finally saved up enough for a down payment and you can almost taste being a homeowner, but then you hear about closing costs. Coming up with a few extra thousand dollars sounds impossible. Before you give
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Home Loan Success Requires Becoming a Flexible Buyer

Flexible woman doing a backbend
My husband and I were on one side of the desk, and the builder was on the other. We were buying our first house together. I said, “We need the payment to be $500 a month because we’re paying $400 now and I know we can afford $500. I don’t mean $520 or $550. I
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Should I Pay Mortgage Points?

If you are buying a home or refinancing, you have probably heard about “mortgage points.” This form of pre-paid interest can save you thousands of dollars over the course of your loan but in many circumstances is not worth the upfront cost. How do you know whether to pay points or not? Here’s a quick
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Why the New Construction Market is Gaining Strength

In the years following the local housing rush which followed Hurricane Katrina, many home builders have lived through a dramatic slowdown in St. Tammany new construction market. Some experts attribute this to the rapid influx of post-Katrina new residents, and others to the general slowdown in the housing market which has affected the rest of
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Common mistakes to avoid when buying a home.

  We’ve all seen the commercial where a man gets so frustrated that he eventually gets himself beat up and left in a roadside ditch.  Those of us in the mortgage industry can relate as we’ve seen these types of borrowers before who make every mistake there is, and wind up so frustrated that by
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Don’t Let Buying a Home Make You End Up in a Roadside Ditch

We’ve all seen the commercial for the dish where a man gets so frustrated with cable that his anger gets the better of him. One thing leads to another, and through a series of mistakes he winds up in a roadside ditch! Unfortunately, we’ve seen people trying to buy a home have a similar experience.
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10 Questions to Ask Your Mortgage Lender

Are you applying for a mortgage? Make sure you come prepared to ask the right questions, as the more you know, the better decisions you can make. Here are the top ten questions to ask your mortgage lender – jot them down or program them into your smartphone today. Question #1: What is the interest
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Why Choosing the Right Title Company Is Important

Buying a new home can be a great experience, but it can also be quite daunting. In addition to choosing the right lender (link to home page), you also need to choose the right title company.  The title company, or closing agent, will officiate the closing of your loan and make sure the loan documents,
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