8 Mistakes to Avoid When Buying and Selling at the Same Time
By Jamie Wiebe | Jan 24, 2019
Plenty of people find themselves buying and selling a home simultaneously, but knowing that others have gone through the same stress does not make it one bit easier. After all, the stakes are so high: If your buyer backs out, you don't have any cash to land your next home! Or if your own purchase falls through but your current home sells, you're homeless!
It's all like walking across the Grand Canyon on a tightrope: The tiniest thing goes wrong, and you fall. It turns out that most buying-and-selling mistakes are easily avoidable—or at least predictable. Follow these eight tips to enter escrow with eyes wide open.

Waiting too long to prep your home for selling

Every home needs a little work before selling. You might need to repaint some scratched walls, fix broken decking, or add grout in a rarely used bathroom. Don't wait until the last minute to kick-start this process, otherwise you could/ ...

14 Garage Organization Ideas Under $50
HouseLogic | by: Jan Soults Walker

Easy-to-afford solutions for your tools, sporting and seasonal gear (so you'll have room for your car, too).
If you've got a garage, most likely you've got waaayyyy more than cars in there. It's the catch-all place to keep stuff (mostly) out of sight and out of mind.
Put order to the chaos and protect your car's paint job with simple storage systems and organizing hacks for everything from sports equipment to tools.
Bikes, Skates, and Other Wheels
#1 Hoist bicycles to the rafters with a rope-and-pulley system (starting around $40) that makes it easy to raise the bike and lock safely in place. When you’re ready to ride, release the lock and lower your bike to the garage floor. You’ll need an hour or two and basic tools to secure the pair of pulleys to ceiling joists and thread the ropes. (Similar hoists are available for kayaks or small boats; starting around $25.)
#2 Use a specially designed wall rack to hang he ...

5 Big Reasons to Sell Your Home This Year (Because It Could Get Tougher)
Rachel Stults | Feb 20, 2019 | Realtor.com
It's no secret that life's been pretty good to sellers for the past several years. Even if you had no need—or desire—to move, the housing landscape might have seriously tempted you to put your house on the market anyway. After all, it's hard not to see visions of dollar signs when your neighbors are unloading their homes for tens of thousands over asking price.
But as they say, all good things must come to an end. And you've probably heard that the white-hot housing market of years past is finally beginning to cool.
So if you haven't listed your home before now, did you miss the boat? Absolutely not. But with each passing month, the experts say, you can expect the housing climate to shift a bit more in buyers' favor.
"It’s definitely still a seller’s market in most of the country. But it’s not the same seller’s market that you saw in the last couple of years," says Daniele ...

Recently, David Greene, co-host of the BiggerPockets podcast and a nationally renowned author and speaker, wrote an article in Forbes explaining how investing in real estate could help build wealth. Many of the points he made also apply to a family owning their own home. Here are a few:
1. Appreciation
“The rising of home prices over time, is how the majority of wealth is built in real estate. This is the ‘home run’ you hear of when people make a large windfall of money. While prices fluctuate, over the long run real estate values have always gone up, always, and there is no reason to think that is going to change.
One thing to consider when it comes to real estate appreciation affecting your ROI is the fact that appreciation combined with leverage offers huge returns. If you buy a property for $200,000 and it appreciates to $220,000, your property had made you a 10% return. However, you likely didn’t pay cash for the property and instead used the bank’s money. If you consider that you. ...

Whatever You Call It, It's Real and It's Here
By Clare Trapasso | Realtor.com
Ever since the whiplash-inducing, bust-and-boom cycle of the U.S. housing market kicked into high gear with last decade's devastating crash and this decade's ever-escalating home prices, bidding wars, and inventory shortages, one question has been top of mind for buyers and sellers alike: Is this "party" ending anytime soon? Lately, those who read economic tea leaves have been hinting that we may be heading toward a significant correction in the go-go-go American housing market. Surely national home price increases have to slow down eventually, right?
It turns out they may be on to something.
“The signs are pointing to a market that's shifting toward buyers," says Danielle Hale, chief economist of realtor.com®. "But in most places, we’re still a long way from a full reversal."
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