A growing trend is for parents to buy a condo for their college-age children to live in, instead of a dormitory. This gives the child more luxurious accommodations (and encourages an environment conducive to studying instead of all-night partying), while creating the possibility that the parents can sell the property at a profit in four years. There are other financial benefits, too. For instance, suppose that instead of paying the college for room and board, you

Many mortgage shoppers are confused about the difference between a loan’s interest rate and its APR, or annual percentage rate. Understanding APR can be extremely valuable, because it can allow you to compare different loans more effectively and figure out which one is truly best for you. But you’ll also want to understand the limits of APR, and why a loan with a better APR might not necessarily be a better loan given your specific circumstances.

A growing number of families want to live in a home along with elderly parents or “boomerang” grown children – but they may run into problems with the local zoning board. Some 18% of Americans now live in a home with more than one adult generation, and that figure is growing. In many cases, what families want is a home with an “in-law” apartment – one that has a separate entrance, separate kitchen, and separate utilities.

Congress has extended a number of tax credits for homeowners who make energy-efficient improvements to their home, as long as the equipment they install is certified by the manufacturer as qualifying for the programs. The credits fall into two categories: (1) Traditional improvements You can get a credit for 100% of your expenses for central air conditioners, electric heat pumps, and a variety of water heaters (up to $300); natural gas, propane, and oil furnaces and

Did you know that if you buy real estate in the U.S. from a foreign owner, you may have to withhold a big chunk of the sale price and send it to the IRS? This is required by a law called FIRPTA (the Foreign Investment in Real Property Tax Act), which is designed to make sure that foreigners who sell U.S. property don’t skip off without paying taxes. In the past, a buyer generally had to

Some 33,000 homeowners across the country will be eligible to have the amount of their mortgage principal reduced under a plan recently unveiled by the Federal Housing Finance Agency. This is a different plan from the government’s better-known HAMP and HARP programs. HAMP (the “Home Affordable Modification Program”) focuses mainly on reducing monthly payments rather than forgiving principal, while HARP (the “Home Affordable Refinance Program”) is designed to help underwater homeowners refinance their loans.

Benigno Herrera, a 70-year-old man in Austin, Texas, was turned down when he tried to rent an apartment recently. The reason? He had a drunk driving conviction on his record – from 36 years ago. Cases like Herrera’s are coming up much more frequently, and raising legal questions about how far landlords can go in using criminal background checks to screen potential tenants. The issue is reaching a boiling point for two reasons. One is that

The average rent in the U.S. was $1,180 a month at the beginning of 2016, up 4.6% from a year earlier, according to a company called Reis, Inc. that tracks such trends. Rents dipped in 2009, following the recession, but they have been growing steadily ever since. Demand for apartments is high, since the rate of homeownership in the U.S. is about as low as it’s been at any time in the last 30 years.

A surprising number of home buyers make an offer for a house that includes some items of the seller’s personal property – they want to keep certain furniture, pieces of artwork, a pool table, a boat at the dock, etc. There’s nothing wrong with this, but it does create some complexities that you should be aware of. For instance, lenders typically won’t include the value of the “extras” in a mortgage loan – it’s simply too

A new Federal Housing Administration initiative will make it easier to qualify for a mortgage loan through the FHA. This is good news for borrowers with lower incomes or an imperfect credit history, since FHA loans are often available to people with credit scores as low as 580 and down payments as low as 3.5 percent. Here’s the background: As part of its crackdown after the housing bust, the federal government adopted rules saying that if