Click Below for:

Tara-Nicholle Nelson on San Francisco KCBS News: Trulia’s Rent vs. Buy Index

Why Rent a Dorm When You Can… Buy?

Trulia Consumer Advocate Tara-Nicholle Nelson on how you can save money buying real estate in college towns.

Order is divine. And in the pursuit of prosperity, it is simply a prerequisite. The Biblical parable of the loaves and fishes is instructive on this point – Jesus made the disciples count and inventory the crowd on the mountainside before he miraculously fed thousands with the contents of a boy’s lunchpail!

If order is a prerequisite to prosperity, then our friends over at Get Buttoned Up! are going to great length to help you satisfy those prereqs with these cute and smart organizational sheets to help you get and stay organized.  And they’re free – just click to download and print as many as you need.  For many more awesome tools like these, visit Get Buttoned Up!

Your Master Goals Form (use to keep an aerial view on 5 goals over a year)

Your Goal Sheet (for planning the path to an individual goal)

Your Monthly Spending Tracker (if your finances are fairly uncomplicated, use this as both a diary and plan for your monthly spending)

This just out: an article I wrote for Black Enterprise Magazine featuring my ever-so-savvy clients, Earl Davis + Tarita Whittingham, offering a step-by-step guide to lowering your property taxes. Earl + Tarita saved over $3,500 with about 30 minutes’ work. That’s what I call a major return on investment!

Click here for the article and the simple steps to lower your property taxes.

AOL real estate has a great article with 10 very detailed credit card moves buyers and sellers should consider making in 2010. This is especially timely because lending guidelines are tightening (again) and the new Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure Act (CARD) takes effect on February 22, 2010.

There are a number of provisions in the CARD Act with significant implications and action points for homebuyers and sellers (most of the latter of which will also be homebuyers soon). One, in particular, is to request credit limit increases – if you qualify for them and need a boost to your FICO score – before the act takes place. Afterwards, the CARD Act will make it harder to obtain an increase.

If you’re applying for a mortgage soon, you might also want to use any accounts you have that have been inactive. Credit card companies are highly likely to close those accounts, in this marketplace, which reduces your debt-to-available credit ratio – a major component of your FICO score. I know this seems like a penalty for being responsible, and it is to some extent, but fair or not, it makes sense to avoid inactive accounts being closed by simply using them and paying the balance off ASAP.

Homebuyers wanting to jump into the dawning Era of Conspicuous Frugality might want to look at the free spending and credit management tools referenced in the article.

Check it out! Get the article, here.

lending guidelines are tightening (again) and the new Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure Act (CARD) takes effect on February 22, 2010.

Image Courtesy of Viking

Title: Spent: Sex, Evolution and Consumer Behavior
Author: Geoffrey Miller
Publisher: Viking, 2009; 384 pages; $26.95 list

The old marketing adage “sex sells” is to “Spent: Sex, Evolution and Consumer Behavior” as your uncle’s old 35-millimeter vacation movies are to YouTube.

Rather than looking at how “consumerist capitalism” has evolved over the last few hundred years, “Spent” author Geoffrey Miller zooms way out historically speaking, analyzing the often-detrimental buying behaviors of modern Americans — from the purchase of a Hummer to the purchase of a McMansion — from the perspective of Cro-Magnon man (and woman).

At the outset, “Spent” sets forth its basic premise: Modern consumer buying behavior is driven primarily by the age-old instinct to display our fitness for survival to others. Miller posits that this instinct has (barely) evolved since prehistoric times into consumer status-seeking through purchases intended, albeit subconsciously, to display indicators of physical, personality and cognitive fitness of the Darwinian sort.

This is probably the single most enjoyable economics tome I’ve ever read. First off, Miller’s perspective and tone are refreshing and exploratory. His personal position is stoutly neither pro- nor anti-consumerism, but rather thrilled with the mental playground consumer behavior provides his mashup mind.

Miller is fascinated with both the wonderful (e.g., “iPods with ‘Outkast’ and ‘Radiohead’ songs”) and awful (e.g., the “Mall of America”) and wonderful/awful hybrid products and excesses of consumer capitalism (e.g., “Jerry Bruckheimer movies” and “Diet Code Red Mountain Dew”).

Miller relates the origin of his fascination as he experienced intellectual awakenings — a decade apart — to both the power of evolutionary psychology and the virtually inarguable certitude that, as one chapter begins, marketing “has become the most dominant force in human culture.”

After full disclosure of his own position on and path to the subject matter, Miller marries insights frequently neglected by marketers from evolutionary psychology with the recent highlights of research into individual differences.

He cites from sources as disparate as New Mexico bumper sticker slogans, Paris Hilton’s fragrance brands, and academic research into the prevalence of reproduction-impairing parasites to support well-crafted arguments that virtually all consumer-buying behavior arises from an effort by one human to display one of what individual difference researchers call the “Central Six” dimensions: “General Intelligence,” plus the “Big Five” personality traits of openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and emotional stability.

Along the way, Miller sprinkles in some entertaining and provocative parallels from abnormal psychology as he seeks to help the reader detach from his or her consumer identity just a bit by explaining (scarily persuasively) how consumerism falls quite nearly into the clinical diagnostic criteria for narcissism.

There are also several chapters treating different takes on deception, from what Miller calls the “fundamental consumer delusion” that brands matter, to counterfeiting and the self-deception we engage in as to why we make various purchases, to the deceptive appearance of health and fertility created by the appearance of cosmetic and physical fitness, as bolstered by a variety of purchasing behaviors.

He even doles out a couple of real estate tips — strategies to avoid consumerist traps with respect to your biggest purchase. Miller advises prospective homebuyers and community planners to shy away from cookie cutter and shoddily built tract homes and toward building custom homes in already established communities or developing whole subdivisions of well-planned, classically attractive, built-to-last homes.

If you have any interest whatsoever in marketing, psychology or generally why you buy the things you buy, “Spent” will be both an informative and totally entertaining purchase for you to consume.

Image Courtesy of Penguin

Tara-Nicholle Nelson
Inman News

Book Review
Title: Live It, Love It, Earn It: A Woman’s Guide to Financial Freedom
Author: Marianna Olszewski
Publisher: Portfolio, 2009; 272 pages; $24.95

I’ve been working at the intersection of women’s issues and personal finance since 2006, so I was interested to see the deluge of pink women-and-money books onto the market over the last couple of months. And I mean pink quite literally — out of four books on women’s financial planning that are coming out just before or after the New Year, all four have pink as the primary cover color (and two have pink purses on them!).

But aside from a note to publishers to dial down the pink in the future (some women with interests in bettering their finances actually cringe when they see all that rose, mauve and fuchsia), I’ve got no complaints about “Live It, Love It, Earn It: A Woman’s Guide to Financial Freedom.”

Author Marianna Olszewski starts off spinning the very relatable tale of her blue-collar beginnings, including the sides of beef she had to navigate to get from her over-the-butcher-shop apartment on the way to school everyday, from childhood through her success as a self-made broker-dealer and hedge fund marketer.

Hammering home the moral of her personal story (that it is possible to live your dream life, no matter what you’re given to start with), Olszewski segues into her logical, orderly and holistic program of advice for women who crave to transform their lives — and their finances.

“Live It, Love It, Earn It” escorts readers through the experience of lifestyle transformation in three parts, starting with preparing their potential, through embracing financial freedom and to their desired destination: making their dreams a reality. Throughout, Olszewski incorporates accessible, simple steps with mindset management tools — all without insulting her readers’ intelligence.

For example, Part One: Prepare Your Potential features chapters advising readers on some basic rules that will serve them in life and in business, helps them to inject fun and joy into their lives (overall — while fostering their own wellness and without spending much money) and encourages them to build an unshakable belief in their own success potential.

In Part Two, Olszewski teaches her readers to both love and respect their money, working to neutralize past money traumas, eliminate debt and transform their expectations of how terrible, dreary and dull managing their finances can be before creating wealth-building habits like saving, investing, and tax and estate planning.

Part Three is all about action — from being assertive in your career path, to starting your own business, to practicing gratitude.

And interspersed with these brief, powerful lessons are the real-life success stories and interviews with powerhouse businesswomen we know, like Diane Von Furstenberg and Tamara Mellon (the visionary behind Jimmy Choo shoes), and women we’ve never heard of (but should have), including an ambassador, a congresswoman and many other successful business owners.

This book progresses from basic to advanced, covers in broad strokes everything from how to live to how to start and run a business and offers advice ranging from how to accept thanks to how to aggressively, but accurately, manage your tax liability. In short — it multitasks as much as the women it was written for.

Part self-help, part inspiration, part motivation and part instruction, if you (or a woman in your life) have been floundering financially or simply aren’t sure where to get started in changing the direction of your life, I would urge you to read “Live It, Love It, Earn It.”

Tara-Nicholle Nelson is author of “The Savvy Woman’s Homebuying Handbook” and “Trillion Dollar Women: Use Your Power to Make Buying and Remodeling Decisions.” Ask her a real estate question online or visit her Web site, www.rethinkrealestate.com.

***

What’s your opinion? Leave your comments below or send a letter to the editor. To contact the writer, click the byline at the top of the story.

Over the past month or so, the most frequently asked questions I’ve received from readers have had to do with when it makes sense to abandon their home and “walk away” from their mortgages.

I have watched and worked closely with a number of smart women homeowners as they grapple with their priorities and the financial, credit, ethical and emotional implications of leaving – or staying. I’ve also been up hundreds of thousands of dollars, and I’ve been underwater hundreds of thousands of dollars on my own homes.

So, better than most experts, I know firsthand – there is no black-and-white, wrong or right answer that applies to everyone.

To help you process and consider the whole-life implications of walking away from a home, I’ve put together a 13-page white paper called REThinking the Walk Away.

This white paper drills down into:

• what ‘walking away’ actually means (and doesn’t mean),
• the pros and cons of walking away,
• alternatives to walking away,
• the implications of walking away and, finally,
• the decision points that every smart homeowner must take into account when deciding whether or not to walk away from their mortgage.

Click here to download.

Image Courtesy of Vintage

Title: The Architecture of Happiness
Author: Alain de Botton
Publisher: Vintage, 2008; 288 pages; $18 list

Recently, I showed a home to a novice house hunter. From what I’d seen of her personality and tastes, I knew this place wouldn’t be “it” for her, but she wanted to see it anyway. We went in and she took it all in: little tiny windows; dark paneled walls; lots of rooms in a home that already had a pretty low square footage; what I like to call insecurity bars on the windows (that’s when there are bars on the window in an actually pretty nice/safe neighborhood) — and my normally chatty and upbeat client looked at me wide-eyed and summed her emotional reaction to the house up in three words: “I would cry.”

In “The Architecture of Happiness,” writer Alain de Botton explores exactly this phenomenon: the power of buildings to craft and influence our emotions, morality and even the essential nature of who we are as individuals located in a given place. When I use the term beautiful to describe this book, I struggle to decide, much less communicate, which feature is more compelling: the book’s many pictorial images or the verbal ones crafted by de Botton.

First, the pictures and, actually, their captions: They are so vividly illustrative of the arguments being made to their corresponding text as to create an enjoyable architecture of their own, in which one can’t wait to see what buildings de Botton will visually cite next.

To wit, a discussion of famed 1920s modernist architect Le Corbusier’s use of asceticism as a pretext for ushering in a cleaner ideal of beauty is accompanied by an “Advertisement for the 1927 Mercedes Benz, set against” a Le Corbusier cubist home with a flapper-styled woman at the car’s running board.

The caption: “A stage set for actors in an idealized drama about contemporary existence.” A series of contemporary faucets is set against a 1783 study of human facial expressions with the provocative caption, “Who would we want to be friends with?”

Botton’s verbal coverage of structures and his uncomplicated, but non-obvious, extrapolations to conclusions about how they mold us as humans is beyond comprehensive. No building element escapes his artisan-level eye or pen. Urban planning designs, building materials, locations, elegance, balance, order, complexity and even finishes like faucets and flooring — all are analyzed for their power, in architecture, to both reflect and create certain human ideals.