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The no-pants guide to spending, saving, and thriving in the real world.

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Selling Your Home: The Real Estate Agent

Finance

If you are not able or willing to sell your home yourself, you’ll need to find a real estate agent.  A realtor is someone who deals with all of the hassles involved in selling your home in exchange for a fee of up to 7% of the selling price.

The hassles include marketing, an objective price analysis, advertising on the internet and in newspapers, providing a yard sign, negotiating the sale price, reviewing and filling out the contracts, and navigating the entire process for you.  The aren’t meaningless duties, so make sure you are getting what you pay for.  You need to find the right realtor for you.

The key to to ask questions, particularly the right questions. You can ask the wrong ones if you’d like, but they tend not to help much.

Helpful questions include:

  • “Can I call your previous clients?” If the answer is no, run away!  If the answer is yes, get the list and call them.
  • “Have you sold any homes near here recently?” Get the names and numbers of the customers and call them.  Find out how it went and what they wish would have happened differently.  If the realtor hasn’t sold nearby homes recently, keep looking.
  • “Will you put your sales strategy in writing?” If it’s not in writing, you may be left paying the full commission, without getting the full promised service.
  • “What will you tell a potential buyer that wants to negotiate?”   Make sure you and your realtor are on the same page.

Now for some secrets that realtors will not volunteer.

  • The selling fee is negotiable.  If you live in a popular development, or if nearby homes have sold quickly, you should be able to get your fee reduced a couple of points.
  • You don’t have to sign an exclusive listing agreement. With an exclusive agreement, you will pay the realtor a fee if the house sells.  Period.  With a non-exclusive agreement, you can list with several agents and only pay the one who actually sells your house.  If you find the buyer, you won’t pay a selling commission at all.

Selling your house can be intimidating and realtors are there to make the task easier for you.   Have you had any problems with real estate agents?

Selling Your Car

Finance

English: Jalopy car in Joshua Tree National Pa...

English: Jalopy car in Joshua Tree National Park in Hidden Valley Campground (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

When it’s time to replace your car, most people focus on the new car, instead of the old, but that is ignoring real money.  Your old car–unless it has disintegrated–still has value.  Sometimes, it’s just time to ask yourself, “When should I sell my car?”

When you’re looking to sell your car (like with We Will Buy Your Car), you generally have several options:

  1. Tow & crush. If your car has been wrecked, doesn’t run, or is just old and beat up, you may be stuck with calling a junkyard and accepting $50 for them to pick up your car and crush it for scrap.
  2. Trade it in. This is probably the least hassle, but–other than #1–doesn’t pay well.  Dealerships are willing to pay something under what they will get at a wholesale auction, which is quite a bit less than the blue book value.
  3. Sell it yourself. Now you’re thinking, “He’s going to buy my car! Oh, bother.”  It can be a pain, but it’s also the best way to get a decent price for your wheels.

When you sell your car, there are a few things to keep in mind, much like when you sell something on Craigslist.

  • Don’t be alone. There are bad people in the world, but they don’t like witnesses.  Bad things are much less likely to happen if you have company.
  • Know your price. Specifically, know three price: your dream price, the price that would make you happy, and the absolute lowest price you are willing to accept.  Make sure you figure these numbers out ahead of time.  Know what you are comfortable with before it comes time to close the deal.
  • Check IDs. The buyer is going to want to test-drive your car.  That’s fine, but you want to make sure you know who is driving off in your car.  “Officer, Sumdood took my car.  He was wearing jeans.”  That won’t get your car back.
  • Clean it up. Get the car detailed before you show it to a potential buyer.   A sparkling-clean car will almost always bring in a few hundred extra dollars.  It’s well worth the expense.

Following this plan should make the sale go as smoothly as possible and bring you the most possible money.

Readers, what have you done to dispose of an old car?

This is a sponsored post written to provide some insight into the world of used car retail.

 

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What I’ve been up to….

Business

Posting has been scarce lately.

But there’s a reason.

This morning, I released a bit of software for sale and I’ve got more coming in the next couple of weeks.

What does the software do?

It’s a WordPress plugin that let’s you bulk upload & schedule Word documents as posts.  You can upload 50 Word docs and get 50 posts scheduled to run once a week.  It takes about 10 minutes to make that happen.  It handles the category, author, and posting time for you.

Why?

I build niche sites.   When I do, I usually hire out most of the writing.  It’s a pain in the butt to get handed 50 or a 100 articles to convert, post, and schedule.  So I solved that problem.

It’s called Word Poster.  You can get the details here.   I figure that this thing saves me at least an hour of work for every 10 articles I buy.

At $27, that pays for itself in an hour or two.

 

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20 Happy Thoughts

Business, Finance, Life, Misc

Since I’ve been on a bit of a death theme lately, I thought I post something purely happy.

Here it is.  In no particular order, twenty unequivocated things that make me happy.

  1. My three year old has the most beautiful blue/silver/gray eyes I have ever seen.
  2. In the past 32 months, I’ve reduced my total debt load by $42,859.70.  That’s an average reduction of $1,339.37 per month.
  3. My insane work schedule is paying off.  I’m more than halfway to making my day job’s income redundant.
  4. My preteen son is currently showing none of the signs of the horrible rebellion that I put my parents through.
  5. The world hasn’t imploded, exploded, or tilted its axis recently.
  6. My parents did a good job of raising me.
  7. I haven’t touched my overdraft line of credit in more than 2 years.
  8. My wife loves me.
  9. I love her.
  10. Wrestling season starts tomorrow, and Punk ended last season with real promise.
  11. I’ve dropped 12 pounds in the last 16 days.
  12. Bacon is good.
  13. Daughter #1 is starting kindergarten in September and excited about it.
  14. Our cars are paid off.
  15. This site helps me stay motivated to eliminate my debt.
  16. You rock.
  17. I may get out of debt just before the world ends.
  18. The Yakezie Network has helped get this blog to where it is.  If you’ve got a finance blog, join today.  You won’t regret it.
  19. FINCON 2012 is is Denver and I won’t be napping on my motorcycle on the way there, like I did the last time I went to Denver.  It’s not something I recommend, but it makes a neat story.
  20. I have 20 things to be happy about.   That’s a recursive happy-maker right there.

     

 

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Braces

Finance, Parenting

Grr!

Orthodontics
Orthodontics (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Monday, I brought Punk #1 to the orthodontist.  He’s got an underbite and some crooked teeth, but I didn’t realize how off it was until I saw the pictures they took.   Some of the closeups could be inspiration for a Halloween mask.

It look like he started with a small underbite that made his teeth line up wrong, which–as they grew–accentuate the wrong.   Now, it’s very, very wrong.

Next week he goes in to get his top teeth done.

At a cost of $5800.

If we pay up-front, they’ll knock 5% off, bringing it down to $5500.  That covers everything, all of the follow-ups, broken hardware, every stage the whole way through.  If we pay monthly, it will be $1450 down and $200 per month (interest free) for almost 2 years.

Almost six grand.

Fortunately, we knew this was coming, so we’ve been saving for this for a few years.

Unfortunately, we’ve only been saving $50-100 a month.  We can’t wait much longer.  With an underbite, you have more options if you do the work before the kid is done growing.  I’d really like to avoid jaw surgery for him, so we have to make things happen.

Our braces account has $3100 in it.   My HSA account has $875.  That’s from my last job, so that’s as big as it gets.  That leaves us almost exactly $1500 short.

I hate the idea of touching our emergency fund, although it does have enough money in it.

We’ve also got some money tucked away in an account leftover from my mother-in-law dying last year.   I think that’s where we’re going to come up with the difference.

How else could we save money?

We could shop around, but this isn’t something I want to give to the lowest bidder.  I want to do it right, and I know several people who have had braces put on by this office, either by this orthodontist or her father.

I asked about a cash discount and got turned down.

That’s it.  Next week, I burn $5500.  Hope the kid eventually appreciates it.

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Sunday Roundup: Diet Redux

Misc

Emergency "Twitter was down so I wrote my...
Image via Wikipedia

I had total diet fail last month.

From April to May, across 4 consecutive weekends, I put a bit over 1500 miles on my car on 4 separate trips.  That is something like 10 times my average mileage.

That’s a lot of driving, squeezed around a regular schedule of work.   Have you ever tried a drive through for low-carb food?   Because of that, and the circumstances of some of my trips, I abandoned my diet on those weekends.   Funeral food is rarely low-carb.

By the time those trips were over, I had spent so much time off my diet that “What’s one more sandwich?” became an easy justification.  There is a reason I don’t break the rules I give myself.  I can’t seem to cheat just once.  Once I cross that line, it’s over.

So, instead of cheating on my diet and feeling guilty, I officially dropped it for most of the month of May.  I decided it would be easier to get it out of my system than to continue worrying about it.

May’s over, and I’m back on the Slow Carb diet.  My little fail cost me 7 pounds and 6.5 total inches(waist , hips, biceps, and thighs).  I’m reasonably sure that most of that is water and will evaporate before next weekend.

Best Posts

My goal is to live my life so that I have no regrets at the end of it.  That means pursuing my dreams and doing the things I love.

It’s easier to do the things I love when my life isn’t weighed down by the crap I don’t need.

Sweating the Big Stuff wrote a killer post on saving money simply by asking.  Often, the easy things work.

Carnivals I’ve Rocked and Guest Posts I’ve Rolled

Shopping Online: The Money-Saving Secret was included in the Festival of Frugality.

Money Problems: Paying Off Debt was included in the Carnival of Personal Finance.

5 Ways to Help Your Friends Stay Out of Debt was included in the Totally Money Blog Carnival.

Should Pupils Focus on Personal Finance was included in the Yakezie Carnival.

 

Thank you! If I missed anyone, please let me know.

Get More Out of Live Real, Now

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You can subscribe by RSS and get the posts in your favorite news reader.  I prefer Google Reader.

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You can ‘Like’ LRN on Facebook.   Facebook gets more use than Google.  It can’t hurt to see what you want where you want.

You can follow LRN on Twitter.   This comes with some nearly-instant interaction.

You can send me an email, telling me what you liked, what you didn’t like, or what you’d like to see more(or less) of.   I promise to reply to any email that isn’t purely spam.

Have a great week!

 

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