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Health & Fitness

So You're Thinking of Buying a House

Introduction to a series on the key to a successful home purchase.

Buying your first home is not for the faint of heart. From the moment you decide to begin the steps to home ownership until you have the keys in your hands you will likely experience every emotion on the human scale. Couples purchasing will find even the best relationship at odds and individuals will wonder what they were thinking.

So what do you do once you’ve decided this is the right time for you to become a homeowner? There are many things buyers can do to ensure they have a successful home purchase experience and many pitfalls that can make the experience far from satisfying or, worse yet, very costly.

Over the next few weeks I’ll be posting a series of recommendations for homebuyers to consider when stepping into the real estate market. If there’s anything in particular you’d like covered just leave a comment at the end of this post and I’ll do my best to include it in the upcoming series. In the meantime, I thought I’d provide the following as food for thought.

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Is now the right time?

This will always be something dependent upon your specific life situation, however many economists are stating 2012 is the time for buyers to come back into the market including CBS News which reported in January “Seven Reasons Why Now’s a Good Time to Buy a Home."

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Is it worth it?

Leslie Appleton-Young, the California Association of Realtors’ (CAR) Chief Economist, spoke last week at an Alameda Association of Realtors’ working lunch and noted eight out of ten Americans still agree purchasing a home is the best long term investment a person can make. 

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