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What
You Should Know
About Making an Offer
 Once you're preapproved for a loan and you've survived the rigors of house
hunting, the time will come when you find a house that you'd like to call home. But first,
you'll need to make an offer. The offer is the first step in the negotiation process. A
good basic offer includes the price you're willing to pay for the house, your financing
terms, and contingencies, such as specifying what will happen if negative findings come up
during the inspection.
Purchase contracts vary from state to state. Regardless of
where you live, if you're making an offer, you want it to be carefully worded and well
thought out.
In the book "Home Buying for Dummies (Hungry Minds
Inc., 2001)," authors Eric Tyson and Ray Brown say there are three key elements to a
good offer.
Begin, they say, with a realistic offering price. Your
REALTOR® will help you with this, but basically you want to come up with a price based on
similar houses sold in the neighborhood in the past six months. You'll also want to keep
the local conditions in mind. In other words, if houses are selling quickly and many
houses are receiving multiple
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Are You a Motivated
Seller Today?
 If you are being transferred, enlarging your family, or preparing to make
an offer on another home, you are a motivated seller - ready to make the best deal to sell
your home quickly. You and your REALTOR® can take numerous and appropriate actions to
help you meet your goals.
But many sellers aren't in a hurry to sell. They may want
to test the market to see how high prices will go, or they might want to try a different
lifestyle, but are undecided as to when and where they want to move. Realtors call these
sellers unmotivated, because without firm plans, they can give the agent very little to do
to move the transaction forward. The unmotivated seller can't sign a listing contract, and
therefore the agent can't market the home, tell other agents about the home, or show the
home to buyers.
Yet it is often at this stage of indecision that sellers
will most often contact an agent for help. They let the agent know that they are
"thinking of selling" and ask the agent to create a marketing plan for them,
including the gathering of comparable data of homes in the neighborhood. They use this
information to help them decide whether the timing is right to sell, how much they could
possibly net from their home, and to help them decide what range home they would like to
purchase when they are ready to move. Then the sellers tell the agent, who has put in
hours of work to get this information, that they will let
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New Tax Law and Your Mortgage Interest Deduction
 While it may appear at first glance that the new tax bill won't affect
homeowners overall, you have to look at the fine print to realize the new rates and tables
may actually knock some homeowners out of the mortgage interest deduction game. At the
same time, for tax payers who earned more than $47,450 in 2002 – you will notice a
tremendous reduction in taxes, as you drop from a tax rate of 27 percent down to 15
percent (don't tell me that won't affect an economy or two.)
If you were on the cusp of the two tax brackets, your
mortgage interest deduction should now become a very important part of your tax strategy.
If it brings you down to the lower bracket, you're going to save hundreds of dollars over
last year's numbers. Keep in mind, I'm not an accountant, but just look at the tables at
www.cch.com (the web site for CCH Incorporated, a leading provider of tax and business law
information and software) and you'll see what I'm talking
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More Articles
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Home
ownership has opened the door to the second phase of the New Economy, but that's just the
beginning of what it can do for you, your family and your community. 
