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Whether you are in the market for water front property or a current homeowner, you will want to consider how you are going to maintain your home.  Most likely you were drawn to your water front property because of the peace and beauty of the location. There’s no doubt about it, most owners of water front property are nature lovers through and through.  So it stands to reason that these homeowners would be very concerned about maintaining their real estate in the most natural way possible.  Taking care in the maintenance of your water front home is not only good protection of your investment; it makes you into an environmental steward, an important consideration in these days of concern over global warming.

If you are currently interested in buying a water front property, you are either looking at existing homes or thinking about building your own.  There are several things you can do in advance to make green maintenance of your water front property a breeze later.  One major consideration is to keep the water front property as close to its natural state as possible.  Look around at the property surrounding your potential new home.  Does it look natural, with indigenous trees and vegetation?  Or has it been landscaped and bricked over to mimic the urban life from which you want to get away?  The reason you’ve purchased a water front property is to escape city life, and you don’t want to have to fuss with yard work the way you do in town.  Who wants to spend time mowing a lawn when you could be walking the beach or dropping a line into the river? (more…)

Terms for investments are everywhere in real estate.  You may hear lenders, agents and brokers talking the real estate jargon.  If you are finding a way to be a part of the real estate world for any type of investment, you will want to become familiar with the different terms that are used in real estate.  The first one to define is comparable sales. 

Often times, comparable sales will be termed as comps.  These will be the basis of your real estate investment and are important to know.  If you are looking at a property, always ask what the comps are on the property.  Your real estate agent, or you, will then look up a variety of factors to compare your property with the others around it.  You can find these through various companies, the multiple listing service, (MLS), and even courthouses and newspapers.  (more…)

The foreign exchange, or forex, markets are defined as the trading of world currencies.  Entities such as large banks, governments, corporations, financial markets, and even individual investors trade over $1.9 trillion every day in international currencies.  It is a growing market that is open 24 hours a day except on weekends, and it is unique in its global reach. 

A tool on which some forex traders rely to tell them when to buy and sell is the concept of Bollinger Bands.  Created by John Bollinger in the 1980s, this technical indicator was developed to define what is high or low relative to the current price of an investment.  Bollinger Bands consist of three lines, the middle one being a simple moving average of past prices, usually calculated at 20 periods, which represents the trend during the immediate term.  The upper band takes the values of the middle band and adds the product of the standard deviation, calculated out from the same number of periods as the moving average, and a set factor, typically 2, and the lower band is the difference of the middle band value and that same standard deviation product.  These bands set a high and low range for each price represented on the chart, and are useful in determining patters based on any indicators that may have occurred.  (more…)