Real Estate Tip of the Day

Buying your first home can be a strenuous and emotionally toilsome experience.  From getting your mind around the concept of committing yourself to purchasing your first home to preparing yourself financially to endure the process.  Today's tip is part of a two part series that highlights a constructive approach to reducing some of the stress and anxiety this process can generate.

First step, start from the bottom.  Make an affirmative decision that owning your first home is something that you really want to do and not the dream of cousin ricky on your father's cousin side.  Next, do some financial spring cleaning.  Take a hard look at your current credit standing.  Order a copy of your credit report.  You can obtain free copy of your report from websites such as consumerinfo.com, freecreditreport.com and other similiar sites.  If  your credit standing is a little shaky that's ok.  Work on paying down your debts and removing any erroneous red flags to rebuild your reputable credit standing. 
 
Once you have a clear understanding of where you stand financially next figure out what you would you really want out of your new home.  Make a checklist of everything that you would like your new home to have and what you are not willing to marginalize. Some examples of that could be:  spacious backyard, three bedrooms, two bathrooms, fully detatached home, etc.  This list extremely important because your next step will be locating a reputable realtor.  This list will provide the realtor with important information about your likes and dislikes and would allow them to be able to effectively show you properties that are worth your consideration.  

Tomorrow we will take a look into getting prequalified, crunching the numbers and all of the additional costs that we can easily overlook.