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What Is a Credit Report and Why Does it Matter?
A credit report is a comprehensive summary of your current borrowing status and past credit history. Itâs a window into how you handle borrowed money as well as your overall financial wellness. Your credit report includes your revolving accounts â…
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The post What Is a Credit Report and Why Does it Matter? appeared first on MintLife Blog.
Can a Buyer Back Out of a Home Purchase Contract?
In an intense sellerâs market, itâs not unusual to see buyers waive contingencies or place an offer on a house sight unseen â both of which can lead to buyerâs remorse. Once a buyerâs offer is accepted by the seller, the buyer is contractually obligated to the home purchase. Or are they?
The post Can a Buyer Back Out of a Home Purchase Contract? appeared first on Homes.com.
Paul Merriman 4 Fund Portfolio – Guide to Asset Allocations, Pros & Cons
10 Steps to Finding Your First Rental
When you’re looking for an apartment for the first time, it can be overwhelming.The best way not to panic is to break the process down into 10 sequential steps.
How to Avoid a Disaster When Buying Sight Unseen
A Homes.com survey of over 1,500Â homebuyers found that 42% are willing to buy sight unseen, or at least consider it. But, can it be done safely?
The post How to Avoid a Disaster When Buying Sight Unseen appeared first on Homes.com.
A Simple Guide to Planning Your Cross-Country Move
For the most manageable, stress-free, and affordable interstate move, use the following guide to navigate the process.
Find a moving company
As soon as you’ve made the decision to move, it’s time to start asking for price quotes from cross country movers. Don’t put it off! The farther in advance that you book your moving dates, the more money you can potentially save on your move. Additionally, make sure you conduct thorough research and choose a moving company with a great reputation for quality service and communication.
If you’re overwhelmed with quotes from multiple companies vying for your business, or you’re worried about falling victim to a moving scam, then you have the option of using a brokering service like Moving APT, which has already verified the best in the business.
Declutter and purge
Even if you don’t plan to downsize when you move across the country, it’s generally in your best interest to move only what you absolutely need. The more weight you load into a moving truck, the more you will have to pay your movers. Do a detailed walkthrough of your home and identify items or furniture you can sell, donate or take to the dump in order to scale down your household goods.
Decluttering can be overwhelming, but a good rule of thumb is to throw out anything you haven’t worn or used in the last year. You can use your savings from your cross-country move to upgrade and replace anything you need.
Get organized
If you opt for a full-service move, your packers will label each box with the name of the room they’re packing so they’ll know where to put the boxes on the other end of the move. It can be tempting to move items from room to room during the organizing process, but unless you’re willing to go searching for your bathroom towels all over your new home, you’ll likely benefit from leaving everything in its place.
Ahead of your pack-out date, use a moving checklist to keep up with your preparation to-dos. This way, you’ll be able to answer any questions the movers have about your household goods, and you’ll be prepared for a smooth and simple process.
As your pack out progresses, you and the movers will create a written inventory of your items. Once you reach your destination, you’ll use this list to verify you’ve received everything they moved from your home. If any items are missing or damaged, you may be able to file an insurance claim for reimbursement.
Decide when to schedule your move
If your relocation is time-sensitive, then you may not have as much flexibility in your moving schedule. Moving companies are busiest in the summer because families often wait until kids are out of school before making huge transitions. Therefore, prices are higher in peak seasons due to demand. However, if you’re able to take your time and plan out each detail of your move, then you may be able to save money by booking movers during the non-peak season from late fall to early spring.
You’ll also want to have a contingency plan in case of severe weather or other situations that can negatively impact your move. Make sure to give yourself plenty of time for packing, loading and traveling.
Be strategic with your supply budget
The cost of boxes, packing paper, moving blankets and tape add up quickly, making even a DIY more costly than you originally planned. Therefore, it’s important to look for deals where you can find them. Check Facebook Marketplace for free or cheap recycled boxes, and start saving your Amazon shipping boxes. Use towels, clothes, and linens to wrap, pad and protect breakables instead of buying bubble wrap. Additionally, if you foresee several major moves in your future, you can invest in large totes and storage containers, and avoid buying cardboard boxes altogether.
A cross-country move doesn’t have to break your spirit or your bank. By following these steps and giving yourself the time and space to plan, your interstate relocation will seem like the best decision you ever made.
5 Ways to Clean Your Stove Grates
It’s easy to keep your oven squeaky clean âjust follow these tips!
The post 5 Ways to Clean Your Stove Grates appeared first on Apartment Living Tips – Apartment Tips from ApartmentGuide.com.
5 Must-Dos for Your End of Summer Maintenance
Summer’s almost over and it’ll soon be time to prep for cooler weather. Add these tasks to your end-of-summer maintenance for a smooth seasonal transition!
The post 5 Must-Dos for Your End of Summer Maintenance appeared first on Homes.com.
Money Talk: Andrew Simonet on Becoming an Artist
Money Girl Laura Adams: When did you decide that you wanted to become an author (or other career)?
Andrew Simonet: I decided to be a choreographer in September 1988, after my first week of dance class at age nineteen. That’s quite old to start dancing, but male dancers get a lot of leeway. It was sudden and complete. Dance was something I had been searching for without knowing it. Dance was my portal.
Writing showed up in my life at age 35. Specifically, a story showed up, an odd bunch of friends who have to protect themselves and their town from a benignly evil corporation. I dictated dialogue into a tape recorder while driving to my dance teaching job. I wrote scenes in spare moments when I traveled. I lost most of it in a computer crash and assumed I would stop, but the characters wouldn’t leave me alone.
I didn’t decide to become an Author; I decided to write. I wanted to dive into sentences and characters and story. For my own mental health, I am very careful about the difference between wanting to write (generative, expansive) and wanting to have written (paralyzing, stressful). The artist life quickly becomes brutal for those who want to have created.
I worked on that first novel for seven years—it has never been published—while running my dance company. The solitude of writing was a reprieve from the social intensity of dance making and collaboration.
I was interested in writing when I was young, but, seen from the present moment, I was not ready. I wrote clever, bloodless things. I had dreadfully linear things to say, restrained and over-rational. I needed twenty years of making dances to bring my body and senses and all the terrible magic of the present moment into my language.
MG: Do you write full-time?
AS: N.B.: Over the past fifteen years, I’ve worked with thousands of artists on these questions: intentions, time and money, making the art and impact that matters to you. That project, Artists U, has an open-source book with principles and tools I gathered from artists. It is how I earn half my income, the other half coming from writing.
I don’t care for the term “full-time writer/artist.” In my experience, most artists spend a similar amount of time actually making their work: between 1/5 and 1/3 of their working hours. Some spend the other hours earning money at an unrelated job; some spend the other hours promoting their art, dealing with agents, clients, galleries, and grants.
When I waited tables to pay the bills as a young choreographer, I was a full-time choreographer: Everything I did with my days was to support my artistic practice. Later, when I made a living from my dance company, I was called a “full-time” choreographer, but I did not have more time in the studio. Rather, my non-rehearsal hours were spent raising money and planning board meetings instead of serving brunch.
MG: Did you study writing (or something else) or has it always come naturally to you?
AS: Very little that I care to do comes naturally to me. Making dances is still the hardest work I’ve ever taken on. I didn’t choose it because it came easily, but because it felt impossible, unimaginable and thus unimaginably exciting.
I studied choreography at university and at an experimental dance school in the Netherlands where we threw our bodies around, and, in one piece, performers threw raw meat at the audience. All of that training in composition is compost in my writing life, and the most delightful kind, since it can’t offer opinions on what to write but rather how a thing is made.
I have not studied writing formally. Growing up, I had great teachers who introduced me to fascinating writers, and I had friends obsessed writing and art and transformation. These days, I listen closely when people talk. I read a lot. I follow other art forms, especially dance and performance. I talk to artists about practice and craft. And I talk with my artist wife constantly about art, about tiny moments of life and pathos, about precisely observed experiences.
MG: When you first started writing (or something else), were there any financial challenges? If so, how did you manage them?
AS: Everyone has financial challenges. Work that capitalism undervalues—art, social work, farming, spiritual practice, activism, community building—has an added challenge: I can’t simply apply for “job of choreographer” and start cashing checks.
If I have a reasonable budget that pays for my life and a reasonable schedule with time for art making, I can make my art.
Time and money are my—I might say the—structural challenges as an artist. There are other challenges to making art, some of them beautiful and spiritual, but the things I see stop artists, myself included, are time and money. The positive way of saying that is: If I have a reasonable budget that pays for my life and a reasonable schedule with time for art making, I can make my art. Forever. I focus on those two numbers: the dollars I need to earn and the hours I need to spend making art each month. There are many, many ways I have gotten to those numbers in the last thirty years, but always by treating it as a math puzzle, not as a question of my value or success.
MG: What advice would you give someone who's creative or wants to change their lifestyle about balancing passion for their art and earning an income?
AS: Definitely make art. It is a powerful addition to life, a form of devotion that feeds the artist and feeds the world.
Set up your life so you can keep creating. Think in decades, not years. Art is a long, gorgeous arc.
Making art and earning money can overlap differently at different times. I have earned 0% of my income from art and 100% from art. Both were great revenue models; both helped me make work that was important to me and to my community.
Being creative and strategic about revenue can help, staying alert to unexpected ways you can generate income.
Being nonjudgmental helps, too. Earning money from my art does not make me a real artist. My commitment to my practice is what makes me a real artist. Period. A dollar earned waiting tables is worth exactly the same as a dollar earned making art.
MG: What productivity tips have helped you achieve success?
AS: Knowing myself. Tips from other artists help me when I am grounded in my practice, my life, and my community. Otherwise, I’m chasing someone else’s work and intentions, and I end up thinking something must be wrong with me because their productivity tips don’t help.
I collect tools and tactics artists use to make their work and lives. Some are directly useful, some are useful by contrast, and all provoke my thinking.
That said, I do collect tools and tactics artists use to make their work and lives. Some are directly useful (the Pomodoro method), some are useful by contrast (I could never work on five projects at a time, but I know artists who thrive that way), and all provoke my thinking.
I often steal not the idea but the thinking behind the idea. An artist told me, “I wake up at 5:00 am and go to the studio before eating breakfast.” That’s not my rhythm. But it made me think about my entry into the day, the connection between waking and creating which, it turns out, has been crucial for my writing.
MG: What do you like to spend money on that some people might consider a splurge or luxury?
AS: Time. I always look for ways to spend more time making art, thinking about art, connecting with community, doing nothing, swimming, traveling. Some of that might look to an outsider like wasted time. My life and my art are not focused around maximizing productivity. There are so many crap myths that artists must sacrifice everything for their art or their success. I find that toxic and extractive, directly opposed to the values I strive to put in my dances and my writing. I see a lot of art and think: That was made by a stressed out artist.
MG: What’s the best thing you’ve bought in the last few months?
AS: I bought a guitar from a guy in Vermont. We stood in his cold barn, I played one chord and knew it was right. To pay for it, I sold a difficult-to-play guitar given me by a former stepfather, a complicated figure in my life. I’d spent years struggling to play and to fix this awkward instrument. It was exactly like my relationship with my ex-stepfather. If you wrote this guitar into a novel, it would be a painfully obvious symbol.
MG: What’s the biggest money mistake you’ve ever made?
AS: Not buying a house in Philadelphia when I was in my twenties, preferably a multi-unit house. I could have lived in one apartment and rented out the others. Best way for artists to build assets.
MG: Tell me a financial rule that you never break.
AS: Only buy used cars, only from individuals, and always get it looked at by a trusted mechanic. No new cars, no dealers, no loans.
Know the difference between depreciating assets (cars, computers) and appreciating assets (real estate, investments.)
I am shocked to see artists struggling to pay their rent while making monthly payments on a car that loses value every day.