Mighty Bargain Hunter

Woe to the lender who guesses wrong

February 17th, 2010

The standard Settlement Statement, the HUD-1, just got a makeover this December.  The extra page is an extra burden on lenders to get the Good Faith Estimate right the first time.

Last week at the closing for our new house, we got a small bonus courtesy of the new requirements.  The expenses are broken down into three categories based on how closely the actual charges have to agree with those on the Good Faith Estimate:

• Charges that cannot increase at all - the loan origination charge, the cost of points for the chosen interest rate, adjusted origination charges, and transfer taxes
• Charges that cannot increase by more than 10% - government recording charges, appraisal fees, cost of credit reports, cost of tax services, cost of flood certification, and cost of pest inspection
• Charges that are allowed to change – initial escrow deposit, daily interest charges, homeowner’s insurance, title services, lender’s title insurance, owner’s title insurance, and home buyer’s warranty

In our case, the lender underestimated our transfer taxes by $41.85, so we got that as a credit at closing.  What kind of sucked for the lender was that they overestimated the cost of the credit report by $26.67, and overestimated the cost of the appraisal by $50.00, but couldn’t use either of these to offset the underestimate of the transfer taxes.

The new page of the HUD-1 was the result of a November, 2008, rule change to the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act (RESPA), and went into effect at the beginning of 2010.  Though the little bonus at closing was nice, these extra regulations just slow the whole process down and mean extra costs for everyone in the long run.  The background research to get the better estimates is an additional cost.  Filling out the third page is an additional cost all the way up the chain.  The loan still goes through, I still end up owing lots of money, and the lender still has my first-born in escrow the whole time — in essence, the same kind of lender-borrower relationship that existed before — but it’s not as efficient as it was before.

For the meantime, though, lenders now have to pay for some of their bad guesses.

Posted in Banking, Real Estate | 1 Comment »

Friday Fiscals: Late-night edition

February 13th, 2010

Had to catch up a bit at work after running around Thursday to close on our new house.

So it’s Saturday morning Fiscals, but here are great links nonetheless

• A Gai Shan Life has an elaborate post on pets and preparedness.
• The Millionaire Nurse discusses life insurance needs.
• Sweating the Big Stuff talks about the best deal ever.
• The Frugal Lawyer tried out Credit Karma.
• Everybody Loves Your Money outlines someone’s big ol’ lost dream.
• Frugal Dad has 33 essentials for your bug-out bag.
• Frugal For Life is beating back the frugal fatigue.
• Money Crashers has 5 easy ways to make some extra cash.
• Mrs. Micah shows how to create a personal balance sheet.
• My Dollar Plan asks if you should use savings to pay off debt.

Special thanks to Wise Bread and The Simple Dollar for sending a whole boatload of traffic this week from the mentions in their roundups.  Also a shout-out to Get Rich Slowly for including my bank post in this week’s Carnival of Personal Finance.  Lastly, both this site and the Carnival of Debt Reduction site cracked a nice new compilation of financial resource links.

Enjoy the weekend!

Posted in Roundups | 3 Comments »

How to enlist Gmail to sell your Craigslist items for you

February 10th, 2010

A friend from our previous church sent me an e-mail tonight. Because we’ve been buried in 1.2 miles of snow for the past few days, she had the opportunity to pile through some projects. She had just gotten to a pile of stuff she had been meaning to sell for quite some time, and e-mailed me to ask for help since I had offered before.

I explained how she could get an estimate of market value through eBay for the things she wanted to sell, then gave some suggestions on when to sell on eBay and when to sell on Craigslist.

Some kinds of items, especially big ones, can do better on Craigslist.  For those items, I told her how I would go about selling them there:

1. Prior to listing the item on Craigslist, I’d sign up for a Gmail account, or use one that I didn’t mind getting passed around the Internet via Craigslist.  Like MbhuntersCoolItems4Sale@gmail.com or something like that.
2. I’d write a fairly detailed description of what I was selling.
3. I’d take pictures of the item(s) and put them up on Flickr someplace that allowed me to post items for sale.  These would be linked to in my description.
4. I’d use the Vacation Responder feature in Gmail to deliver my description on demand.  To get there, go to the Settings link in the upper-right of the main Gmail screen, and go to (almost) the bottom of the General tab.
5. Then I’d put the ad up, which would be an attention-grabbing headline of some kind, plus the following:  “Send a blank e-mail to MbhuntersCoolItems4Sale@gmail.com for instant details, plus contact information.  Your e-mail address will be used only to send you this information (once) and will not be sold or rented.”

What are the advantages of doing it this way? There are several:

1. It screens out many who aren’t serious about buying the item. Providing an e-mail address is a barrier.  Not everyone will do it.  Serious buyers will.  These are the ones you want to hear from, not the tire-kickers.
2. You can answer common questions in the auto-reply. There’s a surprising amount of space available in the Vacation Responder.  If you answer questions there, they won’t call you up to ask them.  Saves time and screens out more would-be non-buyers.
3. You aren’t posting your phone number on Craigslist. You’re posting an e-mail address, but not your phone number.  Heck, you don’t even have to post your phone number in the autoresponder message:  Ask them to e-mail you with more questions.  More screening.
4. By the time people get on the phone with you, they should be pretty serious about buying the item.
5. Once the items are sold, you can delete any personal information you put in the autoresponder.  Or replace it with this message:  “Thanks for requesting information about this item, but it’s already been sold.  Have a nice day!”

Craigslist is free, but free comes at a price:  your time.  Following this kind of selling process will reduce the time you spend screening out people who aren’t really serious buyers.

Posted in Making Money | 11 Comments »

Three ways to find a cool deal using Google

February 7th, 2010

(This guest post is by Ann Smarty, a search engine geek, social media enthusiast and a passionate blogger. She has recently started a community of guest bloggers, so if you have a blog and want to promote it for absolutely free, go help Ann build the valuable tool for that by joining and participating.)

Bargain hunting is only effective when done right otherwise you find yourself using a coupon whenever you are aware of one (which causes even more spending) or always forgetting to use a coupon (how many of us first buy something and only then remember they saw a deal for the same product in another store?).

Anyway, here’s my point: to take advantage of special offers, you don’t need to be a bargain hunter (meaning that you don’t need to keep track of all the deals and coupons around the web). All you need is to know how to find a good deal only when you need one.

And, quite naturally, when it comes to searching, Google is more often than not the only tool you will ever need. So here are the 3 (somewhat advanced) Google search tricks to help you find a good timely deal:

1. Search for Synonyms and Related Words

Various sites can use various words to call its special offer: a bargain, a coupon, a sale, etc, etc. To make sure you include all those in your search results, try the following tricks:

1. ~ operator

This search operator will include all synonyms which it refers to, for example [laptop ~coupon] will include [laptop promotion], [laptop deals], [laptop sale], etc and even [laptop free shipping]:

2. OR operator

If you want search results to include any of the terms you mention, use OR between them, for example laptop (coupons OR deals OR promotions):

3. * operator

If you are unsure what exactly you want to search (for example, you don’t know which exactly computer you plan to buy), use * (wildcard) operator. Google will substitute it for one or more related words. For example, [ "* laptops coupons" (with the quotes) will include Dell laptops coupons, cheap laptops coupons, instant laptops coupons, etc:

2. Search For the Recent Results

One of the search options I use most of the time is Google's date search: it is accessed via clicking "Show options" link above the search results. It opens up a search side panel which contains the following options:

• Latest (to see real-time search results from social media sites like Twitter);
• Past 24 hours (to see pages created/updated over the past 24 hours);
• Past week (to see pages created/updated over the past week);
• Past year (to see pages created/updated over the past year);
• Specific date range (to choose the time frame).

These options are an awesome help if you need to find most recent search results (in our case, to find fresh deals and newest coupons).

3. Search Within a Site

We all have our favorite sites when it comes to any daily tasks and interests. For example, for me, Google is the only tool to do web search (I never need to use any other) and Buxr is the only site to locate a shopping deal. For the maximum efficiency, I just need to combine the two.

Google's SITE: operator allows to restrict your search to any given domain, for example [site:buxr.com], plus you can take advantage of any search tip listed above:

Why do I need to search within any site using Google? It is simple: Google offers plenty of unique search options no other site has: besides the two most awesome ones mentioned above, there are other advanced search operators as well as advanced search features and recent advances. With Google’s SITE: operator, you get the freedom to use all those great search opportunities to search any site.

So the fact is, Google is a nice service in itself but when used to its full capacity it becomes your #1 tool no matter what you need to do.

Posted in Deals and Steals, Shopping | 8 Comments »