Tips On Managing Your Money To Help Save For a New Home

For most peoples, when you were a kid, it would only take a few dollars to get through the week. The household chores or saving up to buy a housepart time job enabled you to buy pretty much anything you wanted because your overhead was much lower.  After you get through school and get your first full time job the majority of people want to get rid of that heap they have been driving since high school and look for something new. Most folks tend to finance the car and thus beginning the subtle escalation of ones overhead or cost of living.

The cars, boats, bikes and then the apartment, townhome, or house is next.  As time goes on that $150 per week part time job that used to cover your expenses begins to barely cover your gas and food.  These are the reasons it is difficult to save for a new home, but it is still possible to complete this task.  It is important to understand that managing your money while saving for a home is only a temporary sacrifice that will set you up for a lifetime of good financial stability.  The corners you will cut, the lunches you will pack for work and the movies you rent from Redbox will all be worth it in the end.

The first task is to have a written budget. Have you ever gotten that paycheck on Friday and by Monday it’s all gone without even a simple goodbye?!  The reason is because you didn’t keep track of your spending and for this reason the money spent itself without you even knowing.  Writing down a list of where your money is to be spent BEFORE you receive it is the way to go.  Simply list everything out while leaving some room for fun things and stick to the list!

After the list is complete it would be worth going back a month or two to see where you actually spent your money.  After you realize that the budgeted amount you wrote down for eating out should be no more than $150 a month and that number ended up being triple what you budgeted in past months will be your starting point.  Some people believe they are very conservative and just don’t make enough money but after you find the past months you spent $300 on restaurants or bars along with $75 on coffee shops, $150 on miscellaneous clothing and $150 on entertainment this all adds up to over $600!

The example may seem a bit excessive but try to write down your expenses and look back to see what you actually go through each month, remember you are saving for your very own home! What most don’t realize is after the budget is created and tightened up is when the magic happens. On paper you may have only a few hundred left over to put in savings each month but when you have actually lived it and stayed dedicated there is usually MORE money left over, this is because you are aware of where the money is going and you begin to surpass your own penny pinching.

A written budget is most important but being disciplined over time will be the toughest challenge.  The best way to keep this going is to set a small goal, maybe save an extra $100 for the week and celebrate the small win.  Developing a bar chart you can fill in as you go and place it on the refrigerator or a place you see every day right next to a picture of a house you always wanted or even a picture of a BBQ grill in a back yard with a group of friends to keep your goal in mind.  These actions will keep you concentrated when you feel like going out to the movies with friends or a restaurant you will look at your chart and see that $25 or $50 would be better saved and staying in doesn’t seem pointless.

I can’t stress enough how important it is to be living on scorched earth while saving for something like this but keep in mind if you need clothes or miscellaneous items you can still purchase them but be sure they are in the budget, set a limit and stick to it!  Don’t go to the mall with an open checkbook, have a plan for the work pants or shirts and don’t go over the designated dollar limit you predetermined.

Remember each extra dollar spent on the polo shirts you wanted will just push you back even further and considering your closet is full of the entire last year’s line just continue wearing them for a little while longer, this is all temporary!  The closer you look at the person in the mirror the sooner you will find the problem with the spending.  In the meantime continue to research properties, neighborhoods, and communities with the MoveMaps on www.moversatlas.com.

Home Buying Credit Myths: You Can’t Buy a Home Without Any Credit

As you go through the years from childhood to being young adult, and then an even older adult you hear the concerns buying a home without any creditfrom your parents, grandparents, friends and even colleagues that credit is extremely important.  Without credit you probably wouldn’t be able to buy expensive items and with bad credit you certainly wouldn’t be able to buy these items with reasonable interest rates.

Credit is a gauge of how you have made financial decisions throughout your entire life.  The almighty FICO score is what the credit mongers are concerned with, but is it fact or fiction?  Believe it or not the FICO score is a rating that involves an algorithm of how much debt you have been in and out of! Wait so the more debt the better, you ask?  Essentially there is a specific balance between the amount of credit you have, your payment history, loans amounts, credit card balances etc.

The highest credit score is 850 and the lowest is 300 and your credit score involves three major credit bureaus. The rating is their way of calculating the risk of loaning you money.  One problem most people are missing here is that if you have CASH and zero debt and don’t borrow money your credit score goes away!  The score does not go to ZERO it will just show up as not being calculated.

The home buying myths concerning credit are not necessarily true, depending on what you heard.  Just because the norm is to make sure you have a good credit score to pre-qualify for a loan doesn’t necessarily make this  amFACT.  It’s just like renting a home or apartment, if you didn’t have a credit score could you obtain the residence?  Well the answer is yes and that also goes for buying a home.

This does take a little more effort because it is not “normal” because normal is a percentage of DEBT to income ratio and in your case without the credit score and 20% down your ratio ends up being income to income ratio and not every mortgage company knows how to enter these numbers into the computer without the debt value…talk about a monkey wrench.

Here’s the situation and just to be clear a BAD credit score is different from NO credit score, the bad score will need to be cleaned up.  On the other hand no credit is not earth shattering but you will need to seek assistance from a mortgage company that will sit down with you and look at your physical income numbers and your history of payments (i.e. cell phone, water, power) along with what you are putting down.

Typically most are qualified for a mortgage that is far more expensive then what they actually need.  It goes with renting a house, many times large companies have the same issues with not have a credit score; this is a good opportunity to find a place that is being rented from a homeowner.  The funny thing is people with cash may even have the majority of the rent money ready to be paid for a year or six months but due to the lack of DEBT score the person is denied for not being “normal”.

Bottom line it IS possible to get a home without a FICO score but you will need to have 20% down just like everyone else and complete your due diligence in finding a good mortgage company that believes paying with cash rather then debt is a good thing and not a bad thing.  In the mean time save your money and do as much research as you can when looking for a house, I suggest using the tools at www.moversatlas.com to assist in your investigation.

Expert Tips On Lowering Your Property Taxes

Paying property taxes is probably one of the least favorite activities for anyone who owns a home.  While it has been established that paying taxes is unavoidable there are some things you can do to reduce the sting a bit.  To kick things off, tips on lowering your property taxeswe’ll describe what property taxes are and why they’re levied in the first place.

Property tax is a tax which is levied against your home and other real estate that you own.  A variety of factors affect how much you will pay in taxes each year, but some of the biggest ones are the true value of your home, your county’s millage rate, the rates applied by any special tax districts that you live in (such as a city or a school board) and your exemptions (such as a homestead exemption).   In Florida, around 50% of public education funding and 30% of your local government’s revenues come from property tax.  This tells us that your tax money is being put to work and that you’re not getting any of it back without a fight.

In order to lower your taxes, you have to prove that you are being taxed at an unreasonably higher rate than owners of other similar properties.  You can do this in a variety of ways.  One of the simpler methods is to establish that the assessor made a mistake when he or she evaluated your house.  This covers cut and dry mistakes where he got your square footage wrong or said that you have a pool when you don’t.  These are usually open and shut cases. If you just bought your house for less than the value it’s being assessed at, you’ve got another solid argument.  You can lose appeals like this, but at least it means that you got a great deal on your house.

If neither of these two situations describes you, then you have to prove that the assessor made faulty comparisons when valuing your home.  This argument is a lot less clear cut but you can still win.  In this case you need to look at ‘comparable’ homes, which are similar to yours in design and reasonably close to yours  geographically (i.e. in the same city/county).  In order to make a well-founded case, you should visit your property appraiser’s website and learn which factors they consider (square footage, number of bathrooms, etc.) when valuing your home.  Many appraiser websites also have a web portal where you can look up information about your home.  Once you know where you stand, look at other homes with similar taxable attributes.  If their tax rate is lower than yours you might have a case; typically the difference has to be around 10%, but this can vary.

Once you’ve determined that you’re being taxed too highly, you can file a complaint with your local value adjustment board.  Each county in Florida has a 5-member board which rules on challenges to a home’s assessment.  Value adjustment boards are not able to change the millage rates adopted by local governments, but they are independent of your property appraiser which helps ensure unbiased results when challenges are made.

We hope this post has helped you understand a bit more about how property taxes work and given you an idea of what to do if you think you’re being unfairly taxed.  If you’d like to check out interesting community features nearby your home, have a look at the MoversAtlas MoveMap, it makes getting to know your neighborhood easier than ever!