In this Issue:* Seasonal Home Maintenance – Things You Should Do Now Top 10 Tips For Buying Your First Home Protect Your Home While on Vacation (Your comments are welcome at the bottom of our newsletter)

Seasonal Home Maintenance – Things You Should Do Now

Certain home maintenance tasks should be completed each season to prevent structural damage, save energy, and keep all your home’s systems running properly.

The most critical home maintenance issues have to do with combating heat and humidity. Moisture is a constant in many parts of the country, and keeping your home dry is critical for preventing structural damage caused by mold, fungus, and insect infestations. Also, if you live in a coastal area, you’ll need to make sure your house is ready to withstand hurricanes; The Atlantic hurricane season began June 1st and runs through November 30th.

Key maintenance tasks to perform

Check your drainage. If rainwater is not guided away from the house, it gets into crawl spaces and mold starts growing on the structures and in the insulation. Also, if the soil stays wet around the foundation, the retained water creates an opportunity for termites. Termites love wet soil.

If you have areas of standing water, you need to plan for corrective action, such as re-grading, building landscaping features, or installing a French drain (a shallow trench often filled with gravel that’s designed to redirect water).

Look for overflow from the gutters and weak or non-existent flow from the downspouts that indicate a blockage. Check to see if the gutters have pulled away from the house, and for bent spots. You can make minor repairs to gutters for about $50 by adjusting brackets, gently hammering out dents, and replacing damaged sections.

Look for rotting wood along the eaves. Check your roof overhang—also called the eaves—for dripping water and peeling paint that may indicate roof leaks and rot. If you see signs of trouble, consult a home inspector or roofing contractor.

Look for roof damage. Inspecting your roof is especially important if your house falls under the drip line of a large tree or if you’ve had a recent hailstorm. If your roof is steep or otherwise difficult to navigate, stay on the ground and use a pair of binoculars. Look for loose, damaged, or missing shingles, and be sure to check plumbing vents. Although roofs typically last 20 years, the neoprene boots installed around vents last only 10. If yours are cracked or split, call a roofing contractor to replace—they cost about $50 per boot plus labor.

Test your air conditioning. Have your air conditioning checked to see how it’s working. You might want to consider purchasing a service contract with an HVAC contractor for twice yearly maintenance, an agreement that will cost $150–250 annually. Your air conditioning is like a car tire, in that a slow refrigerant leak can go undetected for a long time before it has a noticeable effect. Annual maintenance guarantees any minor leaks will be caught and fixed, a repair that pays for itself in terms of energy efficiency and increased life of the equipment. Plus, you’ll be prioritized ahead of the pack if your system fails on a hot day.

Clean your siding. Algae growth and mildew frequently appear on siding. Clean your vinyl, brick, stucco, or wood siding with mild soap and water, a brush, and a garden hose with a spray nozzle. A pressure or power washer should only be used by a professional. You can damage the siding and you can even damage the grout between bricks with a pressure washer. Plus you can blow water up under the siding and into the walls and insulation, which leads to mold growth. If you choose to have your siding professionally cleaned, expect to pay $300–$500.

Prepare for hurricanes. If you live on the coast, check the condition of your home’s hurricane-resistant features, such as shutters and bracing, and make sure you have plywood and fasteners on hand for covering windows. Caulk and weatherstrip windows and doors, if necessary. If you have double-entry doors (which consist of two doors side by side, one of which is usually fixed), reinforce them with heavy-duty slide bolts, strike plates, and deadbolts. The materials will cost you around $100 if you do the project yourself.

Spending a few hours here and there on home maintenance tasks helps you spot developing problems quickly and prevent costly repairs.

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Top 10 Tips For Buying Your First Home

Before you start the home-buying process, make sure you are ready to buy a home where you will live for three to five years or longer, since it can take that long to build equity in a home and recoup your investment costs. Think about your dream home and your dream neighborhood, but recognize that you may need to sift through these dreams to find a community and a home that you can comfortably afford.

Here are some tips to get you started on the step-by-step process of buying a home:

1. Check Your Credit Score

Lenders base your mortgage qualification on a variety of factors, including your income and assets, your debt-to-income ratio, your pattern of savings and your job stability. But the most important factor in today’s tightened credit world is your credit score. Lenders tie the interest rate you must pay to your credit score, so that borrowers with a score of 720 and sometimes 740 and above are the only ones who will pay the lowest mortgage rates. Borrowers with a credit score below 620 may not qualify at all for a mortgage until they can improve their score.

2. Set Your Housing Budget

A lender will tell you how much you can borrow, but each potential homeowner should create a simple budget for themselves with income and spending to determine how much they are willing to spend on housing payments. Financial experts recommend homeowners spend a maximum of about 30% of their gross monthly income on principal, interest, homeowners insurance and taxes. Don’t forget to budget about 1% of the home price for condo or homeowner association fees and maintenance costs.

3. Start Saving and Stop Spending

Once you have an estimate of your mortgage payment, start saving the difference between that payment and your current rent every month. In addition to building your savings, this allows you to get comfortable with a higher housing payment.

4. Meet With a Lender

Get pre-qualified for a mortgage loan before you look at homes so you can avoid falling in love with a home you cannot afford. You may be surprised to discover you can afford something pricier than you thought since interest rates are so low. Make sure you ask your lender about your variety of loan options and get an idea of how much cash you will need for a down payment and closing costs.

5. Find a Reputable Real Estate Agent

All buyers should have a real estate agent or broker to represent their interests during negotiations and to help buyers recognize the value in different homes and neighborhoods. Your real estate agent should be experienced, knowledgeable and familiar with where you want to live. Trusting your real estate agent is vitally important to buying your first home.

6. Narrow Your Priorities

Decide whether it is more important to you to live in a particular type of home (a single family home with a garage or a condo in a high rise) or in a particular neighborhood. If you cannot find or afford everything you want in your first home, you may need to make some compromises.

7. Choose a Neighborhood

Some neighborhoods hold onto their value more than others during a housing downturn. Work with a knowledgeable real estate agent to find a neighborhood that meets your needs – somewhere you will be happy as well as feel safe that home values are stable or rising.

8. Make a Reasonable Offer

If you love a house and don’t want to lose it, don’t make a low-ball offer. Some sellers are willing to negotiate and others are not. A trustworthy real estate agent can walk you through the process to make sure you are dealt with fairly.

9. Have a Home Inspection

Never buy a home without having it inspected. Not only are you looking for serious flaws in the home, but you can learn a lot about home maintenance and what to expect in terms of repairing or replacing systems and appliances as an owner.

10. Finalize the Details

After the contract has been signed, make sure to stay in constant touch with your real estate agent and your lender to be sure your financing is taken care of along with all insurance needs. A good real estate agent will have a checklist to make sure everything is accomplished in time for settlement.

Bottom Line

Buying your first home can be an exhilarating experience, provided you do some research, stay within a comfortable budget and work with reputable professionals who will guide you through the process.
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Protect Your Home While On Vacation

In the midst of the summer vacation season, it’s often easy to forget protecting your home while you’re away, since getting packed and making sure you have what you need when you reach your destination are usually the things most prevalent in your mind.

We’ve created a checklist for you to use to better protect your home while you’re off enjoying yourself. Follow these tips to have a more worry-free vacation this year.

1. If you don’t already have them, install good deadbolt locks on doors. It’s true that an intruder who really wants to get into your house probably can find a way, but most burglaries are crimes of opportunity committed by amateurs. This means the more difficult you make it for someone to enter your house, the more likely it is a burglar will not make the attempt—or at least that an alert neighbor will see or hear the burglar.

2. If a neighbor will not be picking up the mail and newspapers daily, stop the mail and cancel the newspaper. Never tell the newspaper carrier you will be gone. Cancel the paper rather than entering a “vacation stop” for extended (more than two weeks) absences.

3. Install motion detector lights on the outside of your home. Use automatic timers on inside lights and photoelectric switches on outside lights. A week or two before you leave, set your timers so you can establish a pattern while you are still home. There are even timers available that will vary the on/off times. Occasionally have a radio or TV turned on.

4. Don’t leave valuables where they can be easily seen from a window. You can improve window security by drilling a hole from front to back where the top and bottom windows overlap and installing a long nail in the hole. Most new windows installed in the past 10 years have additional security locks that won’t allow the window to go up more than a couple of inches.

5. Leave your drapes in the normal position. Have a neighbor close them at night and open them at daylight, or use sheers. Sheers help to obscure the view into the house without making it obvious, as drapes would, that no one is home.

6. Put at least two lights and a radio on automatic timers.

7. Leave the bathroom light on with the door ajar to add to the impression that someone may be home.

8. Close and lock your garage doors to prevent someone from stealing the contents of the garage. Consider putting a padlock in the track of overhead garage doors or insert a large stove bolt through one of the side track holes to prevent the door from being slid open..

9. Cover your garage windows to prevent anyone from seeing the contents of your garage and whether your car is at home.

10. Check your homeowner’s insurance policy. Does it provide theft coverage while you’re staying in hotels and motels? It should.

11. Don’t let your travel plans be widely known. Try to arrange for a house-sitter, but if you can’t, provide your immediate neighbors with a recipe card with the information shown on page 3 and ask a trusted neighbor to keep this information private. Don’t publish the fact that you’re on vacation on Facebook, Twitter, or any of the other social networking sites. This is just telling burglars you are away!

12. At work, request office staff to be cautious when answering your phone calls. Transfer business calls to another employee or have callers told that you will be out of the office until whatever date you are to return. No information should be given out about why you are not in the office.

13. Make arrangements for the care of your pets.

14. Remind your neighbors to call 911 if they see anything suspicious around your home. Keep a list of valuables with serial numbers, or photographs of unique items, in a safe place.

15. Keep trees and shrubs around windows and doors well-trimmed to avoid giving burglars protection from public view.

16. Video equipment, TVs, stereos, gun collections, etc. should be stored in basements, closets, on the second floor, or left with a friend or neighbor. Equipping a storage closet with a good deadbolt lock makes a safe storage area too.

17. Upon return, if there are signs of a burglary such as a broken window pane or forced door, call 911 immediately. Do not take the chance of confronting a burglar inside.

Enjoy your vacation this year, knowing you have done all you can to protect your home while you’re away.