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Buying a home can be a complicated and confusing process. It’s also probably the biggest investment you’ll ever make.

These two factors combined add up to this -– you need to be well informed about your home buying rights.

Here’s the most valuable home buying tip you’ll ever receive: Learn about RESPA. More specifically, learn about your rights under RESPA.

What is RESPA?
RESPA is the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act (RESPA). Here’s how the Department of Housing and Urban Development defines it: RESPA was “enacted in 1974 to provide consumers advance disclosures of settlement charges and to prohibit illegal kickbacks and excessive fees in the home buying process.”

If you think you’d enjoy living in Florida, or just see the wisdom of owning Florida real estate as an investment, it might be worth your while to investigate the Florida foreclosures market. Foreclosures occur when a homeowner defaults on his or her monthly payments and the bank carrying the mortgage on the home assumes ownership.

The bank will typically put the home back on the market at a discounted rate, and the size of the discount will depend to a large extent on the location and condition of the home. The discounts, while they can be as high as ten or twenty percent, are more likely to be closer to five percent.

Are you up for the challenge of designing your own home? If you have the time and experience, then maybe you are. Otherwise, you may want to consider hiring an architect. Whether you want an architect to modify a stock home to better suit your needs, or whether you want him or her to design a home from scratch based on your vision, an architect can add value to your home building experience. While it may seem like an added cost in the beginning, the experience an architect brings to the table, coupled with the fact that using one often saves time, can save you money in the long run.

So, you’ve finished moving. You decided to buy moving boxes to help make the process easier. Now everything is unpacked and the boxes are sitting in your apartment creating clutter. You can’t fully enjoy your new place until all of those boxes are gone.

The problem is, the boxes were expensive and you can’t justify breaking them up and throwing them out or putting them in the recycling bin. So you are wondering – can you sell them?