Whether you attend to it yourself or you hire professionals, home maintenance is an important part of home ownership in general. In fact, it is one of the most basic responsibilities you have as a homeowner. To understand why it's important, it's important to understand some of the potential consequences of not maintaining your home.
Refinancing is attractive to many homeowners right now because of the very low interest rates available on mortgages. Most of the major real estate markets in the nation are very much buyer's markets at present, and that also makes it tempting to move for many homeowners. Whether you should take either option, or neither, is a big decision and one that you should make carefully.
Insurance and property taxes are unavoidable expenses of owning a home. In fact, to get a mortgage, you're likely going to have to establish that you have homeowners insurance. Factoring this into the total cost of your home is a vital step before you buy anything. There are many good deals out there on the market right now. This makes it tempting to buy into a home that you may not have been able to afford not too long ago. These two factors will have to weigh heavily into your decision to go ahead and make such a move.
Choosing the right real estate agent is an important decision. Unfortunately, a great deal of the information you'll find about choosing a real estate agent is really just going to be marketing information. You'll hear things like "experience", "successful", and other buzzwords that are designed to sell you the agent as if they were a product. There's more to it than what these words describe. Buying a home is a big decision and some of the most important factors that go into choosing the right real estate agent are really not discussed enough.