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Building A Home: 6 Things Your Builder Will Not Tell You

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Buying a newly constructed home should be an enjoyable experience. Sadly, for most consumers, it’s a nightmare that will stay with them the rest of their life. A common statement made by many new homebuyers is that they will never have another home built for them.

Here’s 6 things your builder will probably never tell you.

“We market that our company only uses the finest craftsmen to build our homes when in reality, we use the cheapest trades we can find, which means that many are not skilled and are day laborers.”

Custom and spec homebuilders bid out the work on your home to the lowest bidder. Kinda like the U.S. Government. There is few Custom builders left who do their own work and have their own crews.

“I have a binding contract that will prevent you from suing me should you have major defects in your home after you move in. And better yet, there is little you can do to get me to fix it!”

Read the fine print on your contract. Better yet, have a real estate attorney read it for you and explain to you what legal recourse you have should there be problems after you close. I bet you’ll come out of the attorney’s office amazed at how little rights you have if you sign the builders contract.

“If you’re really smart, you’ll hire your own third party, code certified, home inspector because the public inspectors and even my own inspectors aren’t here with your best interest at heart!”

Builders today search out third party inspectors to perform “Quality Assurance” inspections. Problem is, this is just more marketing hype than anything. In most states, these third party inspectors do not have to be licensed to perform “Construction Inspections”. My inspectors and I find a long list of items that these inspectors either miss or ignore on every new home we inspect. Not once have we found a home that the builders inspector found a majority of the defects.

City and county inspectors are generally about the same as the builders inspector or worse. Many of these inspectors are so piled up with work that they can only spend 15 to 20 minutes in a home. Besides, it is not the City or County’s inspectors job to look for workmanship issues, they are only there looking for health and safety issues and protecting the City and County’s interest. Just like the builders inspectors are there protecting the builders interest, not yours!

If you don’t know a good code certified home inspector ask around or check out the American Society of Home Inspectors at ashi.org

“My sales people and I can tell you anything we want because we’re not regulated by the State”

In many states, you’ll find that the sales people for builders are not licensed with the real estate commission like Real Estate Agents are. This lets them tell you whatever they need to so you’ll buy a home from them. I’ve heard just about sales people promising homebuyers just about anything you can imagine they’d buy from their builder. Buyer beware and get them to put it in writing before you sign the contract!

“Your home is built over a landfill or swamp… maybe both.”

As prime land is filling up with new homes, real estate developers and builders are turning to sub prime land. Here in my market, we have subdivisions sitting on landfills, swamps and former rice patties. None are prime areas for building a home on.

“If you back out of the contract for any reason, we’ll keep your earnest money an upgrade money”

Many people are surprised to find this is true. In Texas most builders will, check with the Attorney General in your state to see if this is legal. Again, the builder or sales people may tell you different, but most contracts have a clause that says you’ll forfeit your earnest money or upgrade money if you back out of the home. Get it in writing what happens if you back out and the steps you must take to get your money back. Don’t think it won’t happen to you because I see it happen all the time.

As each state, county and city is different, you should check with a knowledgeable inspector in your area plus your real estate attorney before purchasing a newly constructed home. Also, GET EVERYTHING FROM THE BUILDER IN WRITING! If he promises you he’ll throw in a few extra outlets in the garage, get him to put it in the contract.

This article may be reprinted, copied and distributed as you see fit as long as it is not altered and the article remains intact, including the resource box below.

Outdoor Fitness – Tips To Get Fit Out Of Doors

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Experts advise to break up the long-term fitness goals into shorter, smaller and more realistic ones in order to ensure success and to be able to stick to an exercise regime, many professional health instructors suggest making work-outs fun to do! Once you eliminate boredom from an exercise routine, such as only working out on a stationery bike or hitting the home-gym where you are faced with the treadmill and the same old environment by taking your workout out, you stand a better chance of sticking to the routine – thanks to the novelty factor as well as the freshness of the ideas as such.

Moreover, with increased health awareness and learning about the ill-effects of obesity, there is no dearth of the number of open-air fitness options that are increasingly being made available to singles or groups of people wanting to explore being outdoors – and benefit health-wise from it, too!

So, it’s a common sight today to find people engaged in sporty pursuits for a health purpose as well as one that combines a certain amount of communing with nature or socializing such as walking the dog or swimming in a community pool ensures they benefit from.

The advantages to taking your daily work-out outdoors are many: from needing little by way of expensive gym equipment (read nothing more than your own two feet or a pair of dumbbells, if you wish) to avoiding the sweaty crowds at the local gym, from no having to drive back and forth to a health spa to availing the benefits of fresh and pure oxygen, from ensuring your daily dose of vitamin D that is only available from sunlight to being free to exercise anytime of the day, anywhere – the benefits of outdoorsy workout are huge!

There are also many different types of activities one can pursue outdoors, some of which we list here for your benefit and healthful knowledge:

Apart from exercising your lungs and filling them with pure oxygen that an outdoor work-out in the early morning guarantees you, you also get to benefit from the added room and spaciousness of an outdoor environment where you can perform lunges to build leg, buttock and thigh muscles. You can team these with other forms of exercise that are restricted by limited space indoors, such as jogging and stretching.

Thus, when outdoors, you can accommodate various forms of energetic exercise to sweat more, weigh less and look great by combining different motions such as performing standing lunges, brisk walking and rear lunges besides elevated walking.

The benefits of performing push-ups for a toned upper body are many and these can best be realized when performed in a natural environment that does away with the need for investing in a bench-press machine or an expensive gym membership fee. Basic movements for a push up includes standard, wide and close gripping of surfaces that will help to stimulate shoulder, chest and triceps muscles and this can be achieved with simple elevation of the hands; more intense work-outs can be performed by elevating your feet.

If you feel up to it, try clapping between push-ups or even squatting on one leg then standing and trying a wider stance; do remember to repeat till you feel the legs experiencing the effects of your efforts.

Other great outdoor exercises include sit-ups, chin-ups (try a tree or playground), uphill running or even walking like a duck – and you will be on your way to good health, cost-effectively!

Affiliate Marketing Tips For 2011 – Two Avenues of Traffic You Should Not Miss

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Do you remember the dot com boom? If you have been around for a few years you will remember the huge surge of Internet millionaires that started to spring up out of nowhere.

A major part of this incredible period was the introduction of Google AdSense and the facility for Internet marketers and affiliates to gain massive traction with seemingly inexhaustible cheap advertising through the AdWords program.

If you are too young to actually have been there you will certainly have read about how easy it was to get cheap traffic to any website and make money. Aah, golden days!

However, that is all in the past and a seemingly never-ending string of new rules and guidelines have made AdWords a very risky business for the newbie internet entrepreneur.

But, there is a light in the tunnel, in fact two lights and strangely enough they both have a Google glow.

I have two affiliate marketing tips that I beg you to investigate if you are serious about you internet business. They are not free ways to make cash online but in my opinion they do have value. One of them is especially crucial to any future business.

Affiliate Marketing Tip 1: Google AdWords, yes it is the same routine as before but with a slight twist. We all know about writing the short little sales pitches based on our highly researched keywords and how some of those keywords are hugely expensive.

The tip is, Images. Image advertising is still relatively unused and the opportunity for some cheap traffic is still available. With a little creativity it is simple to knock up some graphics, format them to the required sizes and load them up into AdWords.

Affiliate Marketing Tip 2: This second tip is the crucial one and if you do at least investigate it you are making a huge blunder.

Mobile marketing is where the next wave of internet millionaires will be coming from, believe it. You can ignore this and I bet that in two years time you will be asking yourself, Why?

The costs involved are similar to image marketing on AdWords and the technology is a little more involved but the audience figures are huge and it is possible to buy traffic from around 3 cents a click.

Both Google and Apple have invested literally millions of dollars into this area in the past year or so, Apple have gone so far as to rebrand themselves a “mobile company”. Do you think they would be doing this on a whim?