Homes
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Lessons From a First-Time Home Buyer: “Buying & Financing Your New Home” Book Review
Over the past couple of years, I’ve written a lot about my experience as a first-time homebuyer and then a first-time homeowner. The only problem is that I can really only share my own personal experience with the processes, woes, and wins of homeownership. So, when I was able to claim a free copy of…
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Lessons From a First-Time Home Buyer: The Good and Bad of Door-to-Door Solicitors
When we first moved into our home, I noted that one of my least favorite things about living in a house (as compared to an access-controlled apartment building) was the ability for solicitors and other strangers to knock on our door. To be fair, this hasn’t happened with too much frequency — and there is…
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Lessons From a First-Time Home Buyer: How a Storm Made Me Realize There’s A Lot I Don’t Know
Remember when I wrote about my hatred of and anxiety during the Spring season? Well, this week has exemplified exactly why I feel that way. After a round of storms on Monday brought some small hail, heavy rain, and high winds to my area, Tuesday’s storms were surprisingly worse. Luckily, at my house, I “only”…
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Lessons From a First-Time Home Buyer: DIY Until You Can’t
When it comes to tackling household projects, I think it’s safe to assume that most homeowners see two potential paths: hiring someone to do it for them or doing it themselves. Yet, I’m here to argue that there’s a third, hybrid option. In fact, it’s the approach my wife and I just took. I like…
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Lessons From a First-Time Home Buyer: It’s Going to Be a Long Spring
I know that Spring is supposed to be an exciting and beautiful time. Yet, I find that, more and more, it’s the season I dread the most. That’s partially because of what the pollen and other airborne particles do to my allergies — but also because of how the Spring season affects me as a homeowner.…
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Lessons From a First-Time Home Buyer: The “Magic” of Virtual Staging
A few weeks ago, a “For Sale” sign went up in front of our next-door neighbor’s house. This was pretty expected on our end since they haven’t been living in the home for months and had only been by a few times to do some work on the place. Anyway, once I saw the sign…
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Lessons From a First-Time Home Buyer: Preparing for a Snow Storm
Like much of the country, it seems that we in Springfield, Missouri are in for a winter storm this weekend (sidenote: I’m very relieved to be flying home on Thursday and not any later). With this being the third winter since we bought our house, we have some idea of how to handle snowy conditions…
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Lessons From a First-Time Home Buyer: A Long-Held Housing Market Problem is Clearing
If you’ve had trouble finding many homes for sale in your area of interest over the past several years, you’ve probably been told a theory of why that might be. The logic goes that since many homebuyers were able to obtain mortgages with interest rates of 3% or less during rough economic times, they were…
