Buyers, Get an Edge During The Busy Spring Season

Sponsored By

Getting started early is key to success

By Michele Dawson

The spring and summer months are traditionally the busiest times of year for the residential real estate market. Weather is more cooperative and many families like to move while the kids are on their summer break.

But in recent years spring, for many regions, has meant more homes on the market, but also more buyers, fierce competition and an increase in prices.

If you're in the market for a house this spring, there are a number of steps you can take to try to give you the advantage over other homebuyers, including:

• If you're going to work with a Realtor or real estate professional, get started early. Interview three or four, get references and let the person you choose know exactly what you're looking for.

• Get your loan pre-approved. This will give an advantage on several fronts. First, it will be done and out of the way. Second, you'll know how much the bank is willing to loan you so you know in which price range to look. And third, it shows sellers that you're serious and ready to buy when you make an offer.

• Figure out how much you have for a down payment. NAR says first-time buyers typically make a down payment of 6 percent on a home purchase, and 24 percent of down payment funds were gifts from relatives or friends. If that's not an option, there are many loan programs that accept down payments of five or three percent. And don't forget closing costs, which will often run two to seven percent of the property's purchase price.

• Be ready at a moment's notice. If you're in an especially tight market, your Realtor will be reviewing new listings as soon as they're available. If he or she finds something that matches your criteria, you'll want to look at the house and be ready to make an offer -- quickly.

• When looking at houses, look at the potential. There are major factors you won't be able to change -- the neighborhood, proximity to work and schools, the basic floorplan of the house (unless you plan on completely renovating), and size of the back yard, among other things. If you're put off by paint or carpet color or old linoleum floors, envision what the walls will look like with your color of choice and the floors in a material you prefer.

• If you're buying in a seller's market, listen carefully to your Realtor or agent about how much you should offer. If there's competition you may want to offer more than the listing price and you shouldn't try asking for things like carpet allowances or a long closing date. If you know sellers may have several offers in front of them, you'll want to make yours the best.

• Begin thinking about homeowners' insurance now. Begin by making sure your credit report is accurate -- credit histories are sometimes used to determine whether a company will insure you, and, if so, at what rate. Also, the Insurance Information Institute says you should get a copy of your loss history report, such as a CLUE report from ChoicePoint or an A-PLUS report from Insurance Services Office. This is a record of home insurance claims you have filed. If you have not filed any insurance claims in the past five years, you won't have a loss history report. The better your report, the better chance you'll have of obtaining reasonably-priced insurance on the house you buy. And if you're renting, make sure you have renter's insurance -- it's helpful to have insurance history when you obtain insurance for your new house.

Copyright © byRealty Times

Grow Veggies in Your Flower Garden? Absolutely!

• Published: March 11, 2013
• By: Cristina Santiestevan

Breaking the rules by mixing edibles with ornamentals makes for happy horticulture.

 

These "Matt's Wild Cherry" tomatoes are interspersed with fall-blooming aster for a gorgeous color combination. All images in this post: Cristina Santiestevan

 

In my garden, kale dances with cosmos, sweet potatoes mingle with marigolds, and bush beans party with coneflowers and black-eyed Susans. That’s right. Vegetables have invaded my flower garden.

The rules say flowers deserve the front yard spotlight while veggies should be hidden in the backyard. But some rules are made to be broken. That one, for example.

I started growing veggies with my front yard flowers because I had to — the backyard is too shady. Now, I’m hooked. Once you mix your edibles and ornamentals, I’m betting you’ll be hooked too.
The combination attracts lots of bees, butterflies, and other pollinators, which helps ensure healthy edibles. It’s also a great solution if you don’t have a lot of space for both a veggie and flower garden. Plus, it’s fun!

There’s nothing special to getting started. Really. If you already have a flower bed or a foundation planting, go ahead and add some veggies to the mix. Just remember, your vegetables’ needs don’t change just because they’re growing amongst flowers. Tomatoes will still demand space and sunlight, and lettuces will still want protection from the full force of summer’s heat.

For me, the biggest challenge was giving up the tidiness of an orderly vegetable garden and embracing the haphazard beauty of edibles scattered among ornamentals.

Keep these tips in mind when selecting veggies for your flower beds:

• Some veggies are easy to blend with flowers — lacinato kale looks fantastic with pink cosmos, for example — while others tend to overwhelm. I wouldn’t suggest planting a massive pumpkin vine in a petite flower bed.

• Mix things up with containers. I’ve had great success growing sweet potatoes in inexpensive bushel baskets.

• Be prepared to fill gaps created when you harvest your home-grown edibles. Bush beans are my favorite gap-filling vegetable because they grow fast, look fantastic, and taste even better.

• Blend contrasting shapes, colors, and sizes. Bold cantaloupe vines provide an excellent backdrop for lacy marigold leaves and flowers, for example.

• Experiment. On a whim, I let some ‘Matt’s Wild Cherry’ tomatoes sprawl through my fall-blooming asters. The results were spectacular.

• Winter can be a challenge. If you live in a milder region, you may be able to grow edibles year-round. Northern gardeners, however, must plan for cold weather. Try adding a few winter-interest plants to your garden. My red-twig dogwood is a star in the snow, for example.

But, here’s the most important thing. If you’re growing vegetables in your flower garden, you’ve got to treat them like ornamentals. In other words: looks matter.
Sometimes, looks matter a great deal. Formal vegetable gardens are a front yard no-no according to my HOA, but my blend of veggies and flowers has received nothing but compliments from neighbors. Even if you aren’t regulated by an HOA, it’s still worth keeping aesthetics in mind. It’s just the neighborly thing to do.

Did you know that including herbs and veggies is a tradition of beautiful cottage gardens that goes back to the mid-1800s?

Cristina Santiestevan

A writer, photographer, and gardener, Cristina Santiestevan combines her passions by writing for publications like Organic Gardening and Smithsonian. She grows tomatoes in her flower beds and shares stories about the suburban gardening experience on her blog, Outlaw Garden.

Read more: http://www.houselogic.com/blog/gardens/vegetable-flower-garden/#ixzz2O7yxgzIQ

SPRING IS HERE...... CHECK OUT THESE COOL PATIO DESIGNS

Awe-Inspiring Patios Made of Stone

• By: John Riha

In the hands of inspired masons and artists, natural stone transforms the ordinary backyard patio into inviting works of heart.

 

View again

Popular Slideshows

• 11 Trees You Should Never Plant in Your Yard
• Can You Spot the 9 Kitchen Design Details That’ll Make You Fat?
• 8 Houses That Don't Seem Real, But They Are!
• 7 of the World’s Most Mind-Blowing Homes: Artistic or Atrocious?
• 9 Wacky Exterior Paint Jobs That Will Shock You
• Natural Swimming Pools: 9 Myths Busted

Prev

1 of 8

Next

Take a Bench Break

Tucked away from the main house, this restful patio features a big stone bench made from local limestone. The arms of the bench have flat areas for setting your favorite libation. Choosing stone from local quarries and suppliers eliminates transportation costs that may be added to the price of imported stone, saving you up to 15% on materials.


Credit: Sunny Wieler

Image: Sunny Wieler

See All Slideshows

• Take a Bench Break
• Personality-Plus Patio
• Handy with Stonework
• Patio Playground
• Patio Pyrotechnics
• Non-Conformist
• Rev Up Your Patio

Read more: http://www.houselogic.com/photos/patios/stone-patio-ideas/slide/take-a-bench-break/#ixzz2NYUsiSWk

Your Top Home Ownership Tax Questions Answered

• Published: December 31, 2012
• By: Natasha Padgitt

 

Which tax benefits do home owners miss? Will you get audited if you take the home office deduction? Find out the answers to these questions and more before Tax Day.

 

There are a lot of home ownership tax benefits — if you don’t forget to take them. To make sure you get your due, HouseLogic asked tax expert Abe Schneier, a senior technical manager with the American Institute of CPAs, for tax-filing tips.

HouseLogic: What’s the most common home-related tax deduction or credit claimed by home owners?
Abe Schneier: The mortgage interest deduction, [which the NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF REALTORS® estimates amounts to about $3,000 in tax savings for the average itemizing home owner] and [the deduction for] real property taxes.

HL: Which tax provision do home owners often overlook?
AS: You can deduct mortgage insurance premiums [or PMI] if you were required to get PMI as a condition of receiving financing on your home. Some people will overlook that, although it’s typically disclosed on the 1099 that you receive from the bank, along with all the deductible information you need.
HL note: The PMI deduction has been extended through 2013 and is retroactive for 2012.
[Another area of tax-filing confusion is] whether you’ve correctly treated any points you paid if you refinanced. In a new home purchase, the points can be deducted [in the tax year you paid them]. But typically in a refinancing, you have to amortize and deduct any points you paid over the life of the mortgage, and people tend to forget that after a couple of years.

HL: What’s the No. 1 mistake home owners make when filing their taxes?
AS: Because you receive a statement from the bank with details [such as] how much mortgage interest you paid over the year, and how much the bank pays on your behalf in real estate taxes, the number of mistakes has dropped.
But if you’re in a state where you pay the real estate taxes on your own — the bank doesn’t handle it for you — [people] make mistakes because sometimes real estate tax bills include other items besides pure real estate taxes. It could be trash collection fees; it could be snow removal fees that the state or county is assessing on the real estate tax bill. Since the items are included in the same bill, home owners sometimes deduct [those fees] regardless of whether the items are actually taxes.

HL: What’s the single most important piece of advice for people filing their taxes as a first-time home owner?
AS: You have to take a look at your closing statement from when you bought the house. It’s commonly called the HUD-1 form and you receive it at the closing. Occasionally, there are fees such as prepaid taxes or interest at closing that can be deductible.

HL: What tax advice do you have for someone who’s owned their home for 10 or 20 years?
AS: If you’ve been a longtime home owner and you’ve been through refinancings, you have to be careful about how much interest you’ve deducted, especially if you have a home equity loan or equity line. A lot of people who’ve refinanced have sizable equity lines. The maximum outstanding home equity debt that’s deductible is $100,000; the maximum deductible amount of interest paid on mortgage debt is $1 million.

HL: What home improvement-related records should home owners keep?
AS: Absolutely keep your receipts for couple of reasons:
1. You want to make sure — if there are any warranties attached to the work that was done — that you maintain those records and you have something to go back to the person who did the work in case something doesn’t function properly.
2. If you’ve added value to the home — you’ve added a deck, you’ve added a room, you’ve added something new to house — you’ll need to know what the gain is on that capital improvement when you sell the house.
HL note: Tax rules let you add capital improvement expenses to the cost basis of your home, and a higher cost basis lowers the total profit or capital gain you’re required to pay taxes on. Of course, most home owners are exempted from taxes on the first $500,000 in profit for joint filers ($250,000 for single filers). So it doesn’t apply to too many people.

HL: How do I tell the difference between a capital improvement and a repair?
AS: Typically a repair is [done] to allow an item, like a home furnace or air conditioner, to continue. But if you were to replace the heating unit, that’s not a repair.

HL: Does taking any home-related tax benefits, such as the home office deduction, make a taxpayer more likely to be audited?
AS: Only if numbers look out of the ordinary — for instance, if one year you were writing off $20,000 in mortgage interest debt and the next year you’re writing off $100,000 in mortgage interest. Taking the home office deduction in and of itself doesn’t usually generate an audit. However, if you claim nominal income and significantly higher expenses in an effort to create artificial losses, the IRS will see that there’s something else going on there.

HL: Once filing season is over, when should home owners start thinking about next year’s taxes?
AS: Well, hopefully, when you visit your CPA to give information about or pick up [this year’s] tax return, your CPA has spoken with you about your plans for [next year]:

• If any major improvements are scheduled

• If you’re planning on moving

• How to organize any expenditures for fixing up the home before sale

If you’re planning to do any of those things, talk with your CPA so that you’re prepared with documentation and so that the [tax pro] can help minimize your tax situation.

Read more at www.Houselogic.com

 

Natasha Padgittis a Washington D.C.-based communications specialist. Currently a senior associate in Quinn Gillespie & Associates’ (QGA) strategic communications practice, she has also served as media relations manager and spokesperson for two national fiscal policy organizations.