Money Walks

Today the infamous Carnival of Personal Finance and the Carnival of Real Estate were hosted.

Nickel over at Fivecentnickel hosted the 85th edition of  CoPF. There were many great submissions and I want to point out some that I liked.

Carnival of Personal Finance articles I liked:

• NCN’s article on Creating a Personal Finance Goal.
• searchlightcrusade’s What to do when your loan is declined.
• Clever dude presents 3 methods to pay down debt.
• Wisebread presents Can you really make money from taking online surveys.

Frugal from My1stMillionat33 hosted the Carnival of Real Estate. There were over 30 entries in this edition. Be sure to check it out.

Carnival of Real Estate articles I liked:

• Exchange Ingredients presents 10 things your real estate broker will not tell you.
• Steve from 1SiliconValley writes, How much house can I afford.
• RealProspex had an article on 8 ways find a deal without searching.
• Getting green gives us Many faces of Mortgage fraud and rip offs.

I want to thank Nickel and Frugal for hosting these great carnivals, Thanks guys!

One of my goals is to be a home owner within the next 4 years. As of now I’m not too sure where I want to live yet but where ever it is it’s probably not going to be here in Maryland. Houses here are super ridiculous and not worth it. I think the average house here is somewhere around 375-450k. Now if I head somewhere south, maybe like Florida, the cost can get as low as 175-250!

In the meantime, I’m going to start saving up for that down payment and I can start on that as soon as I get my credit card paid off. Looking at my current situation, I think I will be able to beat my clock counter and be able to have it paid off sometime in Mid February. How did I do it? Well, there were some unexpected income that I will receive within the next month. I will get a refund check from my school that will be at around 1450 and my tax refund will be somewhere around 2500 to 3000. Aaaand, my friend who owed me about 1300 will be able to pay me off with his tax refund. So I think I should be in good shape for now.

Anyways, I was browsing through Yahoo’s Real Estate section and came across this neat calculator. It’s pretty cool because it shows you an estimate not only for your house but also the other houses around your neighborhood. You can check out the calculator by clicking here.

I also found some interesting facts about some price values of popular homes values.

The Brady Bunch House estimated at 972,428

Osbourne MTV House estimated at 12,177,002

Charmed House estimated at 980,748

Beverly Hills 90210 House estimated at 1,184,579.

What’s interesting about this is that the 90210 is referred as the postal address but actually their zip code is 91001 and is not in Beverly Hills but rather in Altadena. Kinda funny eh?