There seem to literally be thousands of mortgage programs out there so how do I know which one is best for me?

Finding the right mortgage program to fit your needs and your financial goals can be difficult to do unless you are working with the “right” mortgage professional and asking the “right” questions.

Which mortgage program is right for me? This is a very common question asked by many consumers.

There is no one answer that fits all type response that can be given. Each and every individual person has their own specific financial situation and their own financial goals and dreams.

With the number of mortgage programs out there to choose from being in the hundreds and maybe even the thousands, this can be a difficult decision trying to figure out what is going to be best for you.

There are interest only loans, ARM loans, Pay Option ARM loans, balloons, fixed rate loans, extendable balloons, conventional loans, FHA loans, and many, many others to consider. Therefore, so what do I need to think about when choosing a loan program then?

Some of the main factors that you will want to consider when choosing which mortgage loan is right for you are: how long will you live in your home, do you have any children attending college currently or within the next few years, is this a starter home, will you have a pre-payment penalty, are you expecting any new family members to be added to your family, how much do you have in liquid assets, are you self-employed or do you work for someone, how much longer until you plan on retiring, do you have enough money for retirement, do you have many other financial obligations besides a mortgage, do you own any other property, and many, many others.

Answering these questions, or at least thinking about them before you are ready to finance a home mortgage loan can help to greatly improve your chances of finding the right mortgage loan to meet your demands.

A fixed rate mortgage is always going to provide the most stability in the long run, however since most Americans sell or refinance every 4.6 years a fixed rate does not always make the most sense.

An ARM loan can provide a cheaper payment and a lower interest rate upfront for a certain number of years, but there is a lot more risk involved obtaining an ARM loan because of the uncertainty of what will happen after the fixed rate period expires on the ARM.

Interest only loans are good for real estate investors and consumers who need the flexibility of being able to make only the interest portion of the monthly payments. Pay Option ARM loans can be a great way to maximize cash flow, especially for self-employed and commissioned borrowers. However, Pay Option ARM loans can incur negative amortization, which is when your balance increases instead of decreases.

There are a lot of items that you need to make sure that you understand before entering into a Pay Option ARM loan. FHA loans are usually better for homebuyers, especially first time who may not have the best credit or the best overall financial situation.

Thus, find a good mortgage professional and keep him or her for the rest of your days. The more you work with one person the more familiar they will be with your situation and be able to understand where you are coming from and where you want to go. This will help to insure that you find the proper mortgage loan for your situation.

About The Author

Dave Zwierecki is a licensed mortgage professional with First Security Financial Services and has over 10 years of experience in the credit and mortgage lending fields. For more information, or to learn more, please visit: http://www.gofirstsecurity.com or for more information on mortgage loan programs visit: http://www.nomoneydown123.com/Florida/mortgage_programs.htm

Very few investors have a chance to talk to a stock broker from a large firm. Even if they do find themselves sharing a conversation with a real stock broker, it is unlikely that they will learn any trade secrets. It is not that brokers belong to a secret society. Brokers are often uncomfortable talking with novice brokers because it usually ends up in an argument.

There is so much evergreen, rehashed information on the Internet, that many novices are die-hard fans of out dated investing methods long before they ever learn how the brokers invest.

Avoid Hot Stocks

This is laughable in the investment world, but novice investors are constantly attracted to the hot stocks. Unfortunately, all the big money has been made before the stock became hot.

Cash Flow

The brokers do not worry about the news, politics, or business plans and propaganda of companies. Instead, they look at the balance sheets. Avoid any company that carries a high debt, even if it is in overdrafts and open ended loans.

A company with little debt is capable of losing a massive amount of sales, go through a restructuring, and step back into the market, without loosing stock value.

Avoid Speculation

Long shots are called ‘long shots’ because they almost always miss the mark. If someone walks around telling people about the next biggest boom, then experienced investors wonder how much of a ‘cut’ the sales person is getting.

No company can make a simple change, merger, or restructuring, and then have their stocks shoot up overnight. Seeing stocks head down 80% overnight is quite common, but up? Almost never.

Follow the Gurus

While it is not necessary to follow the crowd, it is important to follow the gurus. Fool.com is one of the world’s most popular investor’s website. While no guru can get it right, most of the time, learning from the gurus can help novice investors stack the odds in their favour.

Avoiding controversial stocks and dark horses is a commandment for most guru investors.

Warren Buffett, who wrote in his 1989 annual letter:

“Easy does it. After 25 years of buying and supervising a great variety of businesses, Charlie and I have not learned how to solve difficult business problems. What we have learned is to avoid them. To the extent we have been successful, it is because we concentrated on identifying one-foot hurdles that we could step over rather than because we acquired any ability to clear seven-footers. The finding may seem unfair, but in both business and investments it is usually far more profitable to simply stick with the easy and obvious than it is to resolve the difficult.”

Long Term Investing

Most new investors watch their stocks float daily. Many investors destroy their opportunities by trading too much. Stocks should be treated like a business.

The daily price of the stock is unimportant. What is important is whether the company will make more money than last year, reduce their debts, and capture a larger segment of the market.

Conclusion

Stock investing is not like trading Baseball cards, and should not be treated as such. Avoid spam that promises quick profits, secrets to wealth, and insider tricks. Instead, follow the patterns used by real stock brokers.

(more…)

Here’s the site: Dow Theory Forecast

Their price is $259 for a year. You get the same thing from the publisher for $299.40.

In truth, I was promoted into the position because the president of the company wanted to get new clients, we only had about 16 workstations at the time, and I was the best candidate he could pull from his call center to bring in new sales.

The “Director of Marketing” title was, at best, a ruse to make the people I’d be talking to think they were dealing with someone important within our company. Initially, everything I pulled in that was at all promising, was handed off to the company president who would close the deal.

Well, after playing lead-gen-boy-wearing-executive-hat for about two months, I decided that I wasn’t going to kick all the deals I found over to the president any more. Why should he have all the fun when I could take them all the way through negotiation to close and just bring him in to sign the contract in the end.

My plan worked perfectly - I immediately landed a contract to conduct customer satisfaction surveys for Greyhound, our biggest project to date. The president recognized what I’d done, patted me on the back, and stepped out of the way. I forged ahead and quickly identified several other strong clients and helped the company double, triple, and quadruple it’s number of contracted monthly hours. From there, I was able to transition into a position with a Utah-based Internet company and I’ve been an Internet marketing executive ever since. All because my plan worked perfectly.

My plan . . . what was my plan really? Actually, did I even have a plan? No. All I had was a job.

I stated out making $8/hr plus bonuses working in a pretty pathetic call center where we dialed manually and tried to find locations for gumball machines. I had no plan to become a marketing executive, all I knew is that I needed a job and the opportunity presented itself. I wasn’t even on the phones for long (just a couple of weeks) before I was promoted.

I had no plan for world domination at that point, and it seems it’d didn’t even matter.

Well, as my career progressed and I moved to Utah to jump into Internet technology, I started to notice that everyone around me pulled together all these careful little plans. Franklin planners were all the rage and Stephen R. Covey’s 7 Habits echoed through the halls of every place I worked.

I confess. I bought into the whole thing. I spent my $100 and bought a Franklin planner. I put first things first, read the books, sharpened my saw, and got organized.

The only problem was that all the planning got in my way. Plus I felt bad about myself every time I deviated even an inch from my priorities. I obviously couldn’t focus.

I decided the problem must be the planner. It just wasn’t the right solution for me . . .

I bought a HandSpring (remember those?) - a PDA that ran the Palm OS. The HandSpring was going to answer all my problems. I set it up, learned to write in Graffiti and proceeded to carry the thing with me for about a month.

The same thing happened again, my HandSpring brought me no joy - I didn’t even find pleasure in the games I’d downloaded and installed (a plus my Franklin planner hadn’t had). The, one day, the batteries ran out and I never charged them again.

Franklin and Covey merged and I moved to New York. It seemed that, in new york, no one really planned. Microsoft Outlook had finally progressed to the point where it offered a number of planning features. I built to-do lists and scheduled recurring events. Deadlines came and went. I kept hitting remind-me-later on taskes that were months overdue.

Later, I ended up back in Utah and married the girl of my dreams (not Meg Ryan - I lost all respect for her after she left Dennis). We reached a point where we were both working and had coordinate our schedules. So, I did what anyone who’d had multiple failed experiences with planning systems . . . I spent $150 on a new Franklin-Covey planner.

I spent a weekend working to coordinate everyting. Wrote in a million events and promptly never opened it again.

A year later, I bought a new PDA - a Palm LifeDrive. It integrated with Outlook, offered wireless Web access, and even connected to millions of Bluetooth devices I didn’t own.

Guess where the LifeDrive is right now? Your guess is as good as mine. I lost the charger a year ago and haven’t turned the darn thing off since.

Which brings me, at long last, to my point.

My career has continued to grow, my relationship gets better every day, my one-year-old boy walks, talks, and does tricks. There’s very little I’d change about my life, and none of those things could be fixed with more efficient planning - well, maybe they could, but I’m tired of sinking money into planning systems that I never plan to use.

Maybe you’re different from me. Maybe you want to get your life all organized. If so, here are a couple of links to major providers of planning systems and tools. I get a commission if you buy things from them, so, have fun. May you plan to fail as well as I have.

Save 15% on New Day Planner Packages at FranklinCovey.com

Buy used and refurbished handhelds at the Official Palm Store Factory Outlet at up to 25% off!

As part of my learning process, I went and created accounts on all the major social networking sites (Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit, Technorati, about 30 in total).

I then set about trying to figure out ways to manipulate them. I played with giving away a free magazine subscription, and writing a product review on a book I’d just finished.

During my study, I found myself drawn to a couple of the sites in particular. My favorites quickly became StumbleUpon and 43 Things, because they were fun and the people that post crap to their profiles are interesting.

Imagine that, me using the Internet for fun. I don’t do that. It’s a tool that I use to get work done. It’s a thing that makes me money from all the social fools that I manipulate.

Today, something happened. I’ve been gradually entering in goals and dreams to my account at 43 Things. I went to enter “find my muse” and “travel” (I’ve felt the need lately to start writing more, and I miss all the travel I used to do before I was married).

On a whim, I decided to see who else was interested in the same thing. I clicked on “travel” and found that 4,265 other people want to travel too. One of the first people to appear was bravenewlinda who lives in Austin. Her screen name was funny to me and I love Austin, Texas (from my days as a gypsy), so I decided to see what she’s interested in.

Now, don’t worry, this isn’t going to turn into some crazy stalker tale. I haven’t tracked BraveNewLinda to her home or anything psycho like that - nor do I plan to. I just want to talk about what happened.

Well it turned out that BraveNewLinda shares tons of interests with me. She obviously likes to travel (that’s how I found her in the first place), but she also is working to eliminate debt, wants to go to grad school, likes movies and literature, wants to visit all 50 states (I’m at 43 currently). I liked her immediately. When I noticed that BraveNewLinda listed her home page , I had to peek.

I found out that she has a blog of her own there that talks about all sorts of interesting things, including her recent experience with “Picture of Dorian Grey” by Oscar Wilde (which happens to be one of my top 5 favorite books of all time).

I spent about 20 minutes reading through her posts and by the time I finished, I felt like she was my friend. For the first time in my decade of professional experience in the Internet industry, I finally got it. The Internet is a great big huge social network and it should be played in like a park. It should be tasted, explored, digested, and loved.

It’s funny that it took me so long to reach this conclusion, but I finally did. BraveNewLinda, if you ever somehow read this, I thank you from the bottom of my heart for sharing yourself online. My world is better for it.

Now, I don’t know what I’m going to do with my recent revelation. For starters, though, I’m going to follow BraveNewLinda’s example and just post whatever the heck I feel like. I’ll write, play, and share. Maybe I’ll be the only person to ever read it. Even if that’s the case, it’ll be okay, because I’ll be writing about things that make me happy.

It’s official. I’m coming online.

Here are the top reasons I hate client phone calls:

• Calls take too long - Client calls could be handled much quicker in an email. If they’d just send me a message with their request, I could schedule the work in my queue and work more efficiently without interruption.
• Terrible timing - Clients always seem to call right when I’m pushing to meet a deadline.
• No documentation - I’m sick of clients that give a certain set of instructions or feedback over the phone, and then, later, seem to have no recollection of having made the request. If one more client tells me that they didn’t say something when my notes clearly say that they said what they say they didn’t say . . .
• Often unnecessary - I have clients who, even though I’ve promised to deliver something to them on Friday, will call me on Wednesday morning to see if the project is done yet. No, it’s not. It will be done on Friday. Thursday morning, they call again. It’s still not done. Now they’re starting to get frustrated, even though it’s clear in the contract that it will be delivered on Friday. The morning of the deadline rolls around and they’ve already called three times before I even get into the office . . .

Here’s a perfect example. Moments ago, as I was writing this, I took a phone call that my CallerID told me was from a local high school. Apparently an ex-client who thought we were too expensive ($125/hr) has hired someone at the high school to work on their Web site and the kid called me because he needed to know how to access their databases (clear instructions were provided to the client when they went their merry little way).

It’s enough to make me cry. I hope they get their money’s worth out of him.

Well, I found a solution a couple of weeks ago and I’ve put it in place. In fact, the call from the kid a few minutes ago is the first unproductive client phone call I’ve taken in about a week (down from 10 each day).

In the book The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich by Timothy Ferriss, chapters 5 - 7 all focus on using simplification as a tool for time management. Ferriss says that, instead of working to accomodate more and more in a day, you should work to do less and less.

Ferriss teaches that it’s more productive to do without client phone calls, and suggests changing your voice mail message to direct clients to more efficient contact methods, like email.

At first, I worried I might anger a couple of clients, but then I thought about it for a minute and decided that those clients are going to be angry no matter what, so I might as well let them be angry on their time, without bothering me about it.

I came up with the following script (modified from the example Ferriss gives in his book) feel free to insert your name and use it yourself:

You’ve reached the desk of [your name].

I am currently checking and responding to voicemail each Friday at 4 p.m., Mountain Time.

For a prompter response, my email address is [your email address].

If you need help with a truly urgent matter that cannot wait for an email response, please contact me on my cell phone at [your cell number].

Otherwise, please leave a message and I will return it at the end of the day on Friday. Be sure to leave your email address, as I am often able to respond faster that way.

Thank you.

Now, with this in place, I sit back and screen my calls. When a call comes in, I check the CallerID. If it’s not someone I need to speak with immediately, I let it go to my voicemail.

I can’t tell you how well this has worked. You’d think I’d get nothing but angry people leaving messages, or tons of calls on my cell, but you’re wrong. This week, for example, only two people have left messages (I don’t know if they’re angry or not because I won’t listen to them till 4 p.m., but last week they were vendors who I didn’t want to talk to anyway).

I did get one call on my cell phone earlier in the week, but it was from a client with a truly urgent need. I was glad she called and placed herself in front of everone else.

Here’s the best part. Over the past few weeks, I’ve gotten an increase in wonderfully articulate emails from clients. They email me now, tell me exactly what they want, and leave me the documentation to prove that they said they wanted it.

I’ve probably freed up about 2 hours a day with this one simple technique.

I highly reccomend Ferriss’s book. He also has scripts for email autoresponders to help streamline those processes, and he lists other great techniques for simplifying your use of time.

The two goals of the expiriment were:

1. Test the headline “Who Else Wants Me to Buy Them a 12-Month Subscription to Entrepreneur.”
2. See how many people would actually post a comment to a Web site they didn’t know in an attempt to get something for free.

The post generated 55 unique visitors during the 2-week period of the competition, and had exactly 1 entry.

The results:

1. Headline testing: Positive - we posted to approximately 20 Social Networking sites with about 30 minutes worth of work. 55 visitors meant that each minute worth of work got us about 2 visitors to the site.
2. Conversion rate: Great - 1:55 isn’t bad. Nearly a 2% conversion rate for very little work.
3. Unexpected result: We wrote the guy that actually entered the competition on May 8 and told him we wanted to buy him a subscription to Entrepreneur. It’s been a week now, and we still haven’t heard back from him. If we never hear back, we won’t be out a dime for the experiment.

We’ll email the winner again and give him another 30-days to claim the subscription.

Topic for discussion: Why do you think the winner hasn’t responded? Would you respond to the following email text:

Darrell,

I’d like to buy you a 12-month subscription to Entrepreneur magazine.
Please let me know where you’d like to have it sent and if you’d like the
subscription to be in your name or someone elses.

I will pay for the subscription to be sent to someone in the United States. There are no catches, no gimmicks, nothing. The winner will need to provide me with a name and address so I can purchase and send the subscription. If the winner lives outside of the United States, they can name another recipient of their choice, as long as the substitute recipient has a valid address in the United States.

Why am I doing this? I’m a marketer. I don’t work for Entrepreneur magazine or anyone associated with them. I’m testing a marketing concept - nothing more.

Get started now. Tell me why I should buy you a 12-month subscription to Entrepreneur.