Realty Insights for Home Buying, Home Selling, and Indy Info

In an article on MSN Money, personal finance columnist Liz Pulliam Weston wrote about hidden traps that can ruin your credit score. Some of things to watch out for are: Cards that do not report credit limits Capital One refuses to report its customers' credit limits to the three major credit bureaus. Instead, the bureaus use the highest balance a customer has charged as a proxy for the limit. Missing limits Not reporting the limits can prevent competitors from spotting a company's more creditworthy customers, since those tend to be the ones with higher limits. Switching scorecards The FICO scoring system groups people with similar histories together when rating them. These groups are called "scorecards." If you have a bankruptcy on your report, for example, you'll be grouped on a scorecard with other bankrupts. Your credit habits may look pretty good compared with theirs, but if the bankruptcy were to disappear from your record you'd be lumped in with people...

I've already discussed how a house can go from "ugh" to "wow" with just a little bit of work. But, some of you are probably still skeptical. My advice for you--do your homework! My husband and I are pretty handy, but there were some projects we wanted to tackle that involved skills we didn't have. For instance, we wanted to redo the original hardwood floors but neither of us had ever redone floors before. Instead of skipping that project or hiring it out for more money than we could afford, we did our homework. We went to the local library and checked out books about redoing floors, spent hours on the Internet researching different methods, and also used the people and resources available at home improvement stores like Home Depot, Lowes and Menards. After we had done the research, asked questions and had gotten all the right materials and supplies, we took a leap of faith and did it ourselves. And, the homework paid off! The floors came out beautifully and...