Customer Rating: Summary: Wonderful guide for First Time Homeowners Comment: This book is a delight and great guide for first time home owners. Even second time home owners can benefit from this guide. Customer Rating: Summary: Don't buy a house without it Comment: Navigating the maze of new and often competing demands that owning a new home can bring along can be quite overwhelming. This is doubly so if one is trying to do it on one's own, without an informed help of a friend or a relative. Even so, there are many legal and practical hurdles that can get in the way, which even the most seasoned homeowner has not anticipated. For all such prospective and current homeowners, "The Essential Guide for First-Time Homeowners: Maximize Your Investment & Enjoy Your New Home" is an essential and useful guide. It covers all the basics of selecting and purchasing your first home, and guides you beyond the first weeks and months of ownership and helps you with useful tips on how to maintain your home so that its value may not decrease over time. The only objection that I have with the book is that it devotes one whole chapter to "greening" of your home. Most of the suggestions presented in that chapter are so outlandish ("get rid of the lawn"), impractical, or both for most residential areas, that it clearly detracts from otherwise well written and useful book. Even with that caveat, this is still a very good book to consider purchasing if you are seriously considering buying your first home. It could very well save you a lot of time and money in a long run. Customer Rating: Summary: Some very helpful information, but some annoying weaknesses, too. Comment: I struggled with the star rating for this book--whether to give it 3 or 4 stars--because, while it was helpful and informative for me personally as a first-time homeowner, it had some pretty substantial weaknesses that reduced its overall usefulness and increased my frustration while reading it:
1. Being tied in with USA Today, the book constantly uses that newspaper as source material. This would not really be a problem except that the book was published in October 2008 and includes references to articles in USA Today that are, in some cases, already several years old. This doesn't seem a wise decision, especially with the changes going on in the home market.
2. The book uses many USA Today graphs and charts; again, this would not be a problem in itself, but these graphs and charts often have little or no relation to what is being discussed on the page and rarely add much (if any) value to what is being discussed. Examples include a pie chart on "Who has the best yard in the neighborhood?" in a discussion on "Getting neighbor buy-in on your remodel plans," a graph on "Number of states with the same official tree" in a discussion on "Tree laws," and a graph on "Most common items boaters have lost overboard" in a discussion on homeowner's insurance. Is this information we need to know as first-time owners? Is this information adding any value to my reading of this book? My answer is no.
3. Since this book is written at a very basic level (you could almost call it "First-Time Homeowning for Dummies), I found it annoying that it would give you a great tip, but stop short in explaining what it means or how to do it. Even a throwaway sentence referring the homeowner to the appliance owner's manual, for example, would be better than setting up a great tip on appliance maintenance and then stopping short of explaining how to do it.
The book covers some great subjects--I especially appreciated the chapters on maintenance, tax breaks and insurance issues. I even learned a lot reading about some issues that don't affect me because I'm a condo owner vs. a single-family-home owner--like property lines, trees and fences.
I am a rarity in that I bought my first home at the age of 55. In fact, my first home was actually my retirement home! I was woefully under-educated as a home buyer and homeowner, despite the fact that I'd taken a class or two on shopping for and buying a home in the year before I bought my home. As a result, this book is a great asset to me as a reference tool to maintaining my home properly, getting the tax breaks I'm qualified for, etc. I really wanted to rate the book higher, but the issues listed above annoyed me enough that I felt it was only fair to potential buyers that I be completely honest about its weaknesses.
Customer Rating: Summary: Maybe useful to have on hand, but I wouldn't really know... Comment: I received this book to read and review, when I have already lived in my new home for a few months. I didn't have this book when I purchased my new apartment or when I moved, but I survived.
The back of this book says "Skip the stress!" Indeed, moving and buying a home is very stressful and exhausting. I wonder if not having to read this book - in addition to all that one has to do in regards to moving and buying a home - might reduce the stress level of the whole thing?
I have to agree with some reviewers that much of the information contained in this book can be easily learned elsewhere (from friends, family, library, or the Internet). The book might be a good gift to someone who is planning or preparing to move and purchase a new home, but otherwise I'm not sure this collection of tips and commonsense is a valuable reference to keep permanently, considering that a lot of data in this book may be time-sensitive. Customer Rating: Summary: Useful with data Comment: As a first time home owner, this was an interesting book to read. I like the snap shots it provides that shows a quick statistics of comparison of people under that particular topic the book is hitting. There are many tips about mortgage payments that helped clear up many of my questions (mortgage and financing has always been an extremely confusing thing for me). My favorites are about home maintenance and the break down on home budgeting.
As for one thing I don't like is that it seems to focus more on people who doesn't pay off their monthly credit card bills, for example, while I do, so that isn't really useful for me. I guess if the majority of the American population don't pay off their credit cards on time in full every month, this book would be more useful for them than for me.
Nearly 6.4 million homes were purchased in the U.S. last year -- and many of them are owned by young first-time buyers like you, who now find themselves wondering, "What's next?" And with the subprime crisis quickly becoming a general slide in the housing market, you're looking for guidance on how to stay on track financially.
With Nolo's Essential Guide to Buying Your First Home, you'll get the crucial information that will make the difference between worrying about your home and enjoying every minute you spend there. Packed with tips and timely reminders, our latest USA TODAY book gives you the lowdown on:
prioritizing purchases
maintenance and repairs
safety and security
insurance
neighbors and disputes
taxes
remodeling and working with contractors
decorating and renovating on a budget
mortgages and refinancing, and
preparing your home for an eventual sale.
This slim volume could potentially save you and your family thousands of dollars -- and perhaps even your home. Turn to this all-in-one resource for the tools and tips you need to keep home ownership simple and fun!
