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Builders buzz about age-diverse housing
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Many households of the Boomer, X, and Y generations are living together as a result of the recession. Homebuilders are taking their cue from the trend, seeking to diversify their future master-planned communities. Age-diverse neighborhoods tend to evolve naturally over time. Rather than leaving it to chance, builders are creating housing developments that they hope will appeal to singles, younger households with and without children, retirees, and multi-generational families. Amy Hoak of the Wall Street Journal reports on the buzz.
Think outside the box
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April showers bring May flowers. Garden lovers everywhere are dreaming, planning, and preparing for spring bloom. But not everyone has a green thumb.
Southern Living’s photo gallery of over 80 garden ideas may be the visual inspiration that reluctant gardeners need. Container gardening lends itself to simple projects that provide seasonal color without arduous maintenance. Any container will do. Here are a few traditional and non-traditional options:
- Ceramic pots come in all shapes and sizes. Raised bed planters are ideal for cultivating herbs and vegetables. Check out Simply Planters to research available styles and sizes.
- A planter that does double duty as a fish tank might be perfect for the office or child’s room.
- The Roly-Poly-Pot communicates its need for H20. When water levels get low, the pot literally tips.
There’s an added bonus with container gardening’s simple beauty. Households need not spend hundreds and thousands of dollars on purchasing the right chambers. In his book, The Revolutionary Yardscape, recycling guru Matthew Levesque shares ideas on repurposing salvaged materials into landscape delights. Levesque urges home gardeners to think outside the box but within good taste. “A toilet planted with flowers in the front yard is only going to turn [repurposing] into a clumsy joke,” he tells the San Francisco Gazette. “Wit is fine, but you have to think it through enough to make the final product beautiful.”
The road home
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For some families, homeownership is part and parcel of the American dream. Is this true for you? Tyrone Beason’s article in the Seattle Times, “Scrimping and Saving for a piece of the American dream,” tells the story of Lance and Jen Miller. They live in a two-bedroom apartment, commute to work via public transportation, and bike their four-year-old son to his school. The Millers don’t own a car, and don’t spend money on lavish vacations. While the apartment in the Greenwood neighborhood of Seattle is far from posh, “it’s home.” Beason writes that the Millers are using this period in their lives as a “launchpad for something bigger and better — a middle-class life in the city they love.”
There are multiple motivators for purchasing a home. Investors buy properties as part of their financial portfolio. Others just prefer owning over renting. And families with children seek to establish themselves in neighborhoods with good school districts. One reason does not trump another.
The American dream — if you choose to define it, in part, as owning versus renting the home where you live — now comes at a greater cost for many middle-class families in the current economy. While the Millers demonstrate the daily act of sacrificing conveniences for the end goal of saving enough to purchase their future home, their situation is not all that unique. Over the past several years, a slew of online resources teaching thrifty practices has emerged. Slate recommends several websites like Wisebread and Frugal Village, for example, on ideas for “scrimping through the recession,” and the information is intended for the larger audience.
Many Americans are reinventing themselves in order to achieve their goals. Saving, scrimping, pinching pennies…these are no longer bygone habits of the Great Depression — they’re becoming proven best practices (among others) toward buying a place of your own.
Helping the kids buy a house
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Post-college young adults who are earning a steady income are finding that buying a home can be challenging if they don’t have the sufficient cash for down payment. Mitchell Barton found himself in this very scenario. He could financially support monthly mortgage payments but hadn’t had enough time to save the $25,000 or so he would need for the down payment. His parents, Curtis and Bridget Barton, not only guided their son in the home buying process by introducing him to an agent who was a family friend, but also gifted the majority of the down payment. By doing so, Mitchell was able to qualify for a competitive interest rate, reduce his principal, and lower his monthly payment.
The Bartons provide a model for when it may be prudent to gift your children money. Mitchell Barton was a responsible 27-year old with an engineering job at a well-established company. Some parents may find themselves in a similar situation. Keep in mind that the IRS allows an annual gift of up to $13,000 per donee without incurring gift taxes. That means one child could receive as much as $26,000 from just mom and dad.
If your household situation resembles the Bartons’, gather some additional tips on gifting towards the down payment by watching the video, “How to Help Your Child Buy a Home,” on Answers.com. Since the filming of the video, the IRS has raised the individual gift limit to $13,000. Now just because parents can does not necessarily mean they should, and both parents and children need to weigh the pros and cons.
Your college tuition or my retirement fund
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As the cost of private four-year colleges has gone up to an average of $27,000 each year, many parents find themselves between a rock and a hard place. Do they fund their children’s tuition and ignore their retirement savings or do they curtail education spending and divert additional money into a future nest egg?
The average annual cost, including tuition and fees, has ballooned by 70% from a decade prior. Public university fees have soared to $7,600, or about 4 times the amount in 1991. According to a report released by student lender Sallie Mae, 51% of parents “strongly agreed” that they would stretch financially to pay for their children’s higher education, down from 64% in 2010. This is the first time the percentage has dropped since Sallie Mae started the survey in 2007.
Deborah Fox, San Diego-based financial planner and founder of Fox College Funding, says that today’s parents have not saved enough for their own retirement. Among the demographic of parents with college-bound kids, only 27% of those aged 45 to 54 and 41% of parents over 55 have put away $100,000 or more in savings and investments, according to 2011 data from the Employee Benefit Research Institute. Parents who are weighing college options with long-term debt (for themselves or their kids who take out student loans) and their own retirement are smart, says Fox. “Students should have some skin in the game.”
Everybody has a superpower
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Decades ago, Attention Deficit Disorder was a growing diagnosis among children, especially boys. Children with ADD were characterized as highly energetic, distractible, and easily bored. Today, this learning disability is better understood, and it turns out that like many biological challenges, it does not have to bar individuals from success. In fact, some living with the learning disability say that it is their superpower. High-achieving business entrepreneurs who have ADHD have learned to harness their restless mental energy into careers that require a ton of creativity or problem-solving.
ADHD, or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, is the preferred term for ADD since 1994, because it captures two primary aspects of the condition — inattention and hyperactive-impulsive behavior. Symptoms range from an inability to focus on details or activities that require mental focus, lack of organization, chronic forgetfulness or tendency to lose things, impatience, excessive talking, and an inability to sit still or concentrate on one task for prolonged periods.
Individuals like Peter Shankman, New York based angel investor and technology expert, have turned ADHD on its head. He embraces the help of executive assistants who keep him on a tight schedule. In his pre-assistant days, Shankman booked a flight to Shanghai instead of Singapore and reserved dinner at two restaurants on two continents. And if work gets dull, he takes a day off to skydive. As SmartMoney puts it, thrilling activities like skydiving may be just the thing to “quiet an overfiring brain.”
When real estate gets personal
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It’s not personal. It’s business. But in real estate, things can get personal very quickly. Have you met anyone, buyer or seller, who has felt slighted during a real estate transaction? It happens, and simple courtesy goes a long way in building bridges.
Susan Hughes Hunter, the vice president of Lois Schneider Realtor, notes that sellers get offended when asked to fix this, do that. “People feel this is their home, their blood, sweat and tears.” Sometimes both buyers and sellers need to realize that what seems like a business transaction speaks to people’s hearts. The way we say or ask for things is just as important as what we say.
Buyers tend to go over everything with a fine-toothed comb, while sellers can be sensitive. Ken Baris of Jordan Baris Realtors sold a house two years ago for a professional hockey player. The hockey pro sold his house to the buyer who wrote a letter about how much they wanted to live in the home, even though another bid came in for $100,000 more. In this case, courtesy and heart won out over price.
New housing watchdog takes post
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The U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (established by the Obama administration) will release model mortgage forms, according to The Seattle Times. Elizabeth Warren, the Bureau’s head, says that these models are prototypes for new regulations on home finance.
The models could be released for public comment as early as mid-May, well before the July 21 report due date. What can you anticipate? According to Warren’s statements in a recent interview, the focus is on simplifying mortgage disclosure and making it more consumer-friendly.
Currently, home buyers receive two mortgage disclosure forms, required by the Truth in Lending Act of 1968 and the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act of 1974. The forms amount to a lot of documentation that explain the costs of obtaining and closing on a loan. Many feel that the format is unnecessarily complex. The Financial Protection Bureau will strive to simplify the process for consumers and make disclosure less costly for financial institutions. If successful, the Bureau could empower community banks to compete with big name firms that currently dominate the lending market, a goal that Warren herself has identified as important.
Best places to travel this spring
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Washington made The New York Times‘ “The 41 Places to Go in 2011″ list not once but twice. The San Juan Islands and Olympic National Park are suggested as two accessible places for travel.
If you’ve never been to the San Juan Islands, plan to make a trip there this spring or summer. Known for its artist colonies and expansive views, the San Juan Islands of late are making a splash with two big-name chefs. Blaine Wetzel, former chef at Noma in Copenhagen, became top dog of the Willows Inn on Lummi Island. Lisa Nakamura, famous for training with the likes of Thomas Keller, opened Allium on Orcas Island.
But the San Juan Islands boast much more than just good food. Big stretches of land are protected from logging and development, and last year, The San Juan Island National Historic Park expanded by 312 acres. In the Olympics Mountains, Lake Quinault and Kalaloch offer cozy rooms with views. Spring specials include storm-watching, breakfast, and access to 3 major ecosystems (mountains, coasts, and forests) and a million acres of nature.
If global travel is your cup of tea, check out some of the hidden gems on the list like Uruguay, Zanzibar, Budapest, and Kosovo. Bargain hunters can search for sales on websites like Jetsetter and SniqueAway, book airlines tickets on Tuesdays (prices tend to be lowest on that day of the week), and schedule off-peak adventures. For more tips on maximizing your dollars, check out “11 Tricks to Cutting Travel Costs in 2011.”
