When looking at potential houses to buy, there’s a lot you can do to learn about the property without ever setting foot inside the door.  Whether it’s to save the time wasted on problem properties or gain negotiation leverage when making an offer, here are some of the steps you can take:

Visit the Realtor’s Website

You’ll probably use Realtor.com, or a similar site to start your real estate search.  One of the first things you should do after finding a house that looks promising is visit the listing agent’s website.  The agent site will often have a thorough description and many more pictures than what’s available on Realtor.com.  I’ve found virtual tours and learned a ton by visiting realtor’s sites, even when Realtor.com had only sketchy details and one, or no, pictures.  You’ll also find information about upcoming open houses.

Do a Drive-By

Another benefit of visiting the realtor’s site is that you can often get an address for the property.  This info isn’t always provided at the larger real estate search sites.  With the address in hand, you can do a drive-by of the house before deciding whether to schedule a showing.  Why is a drive-by so important?  Well, pictures of houses are usually taken from the best possible angle and don’t always tell the whole picture.

Here’s an uncropped version of the photo from above

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This week’s book review is Right on the Money by Pat Robertson.

The first thing many readers would probably want to know about Right on the Money is the amount of spiritual influence found in its pages.  Author Pat Robertson gained fame as a televangelist, founding the Christian Broadcasting Network and hosting The 700 Club.  Right on the Money is not at all preachy.  While Robertson’s beliefs are certainly evident within the book (particularly in the introduction and the chapter on families), the book reads much more like it was written by a true financial expert with strong spiritual beliefs rather than a preacher who also knows something about finances.  Robertson balances his actions (”In my financial planning, giving takes precedence”) with the caveat that you may have different priorities and should tweak his generalized advice to your particular situation.  In one part, he specifically states that an implementation strategy is intentionally omitted, since you’ll need to tailor that to your situation.

The book starts with a concise summary of how the financial crisis occurred. So few people realize the chain of events that led to our current economic state that many would be well serve to read the book just for this point. I liked this book right from the start.  To paraphrase an early excerpt: “Ignorance is no excuse….nor has it served finances well.”  I couldn’t agree more.

Robertson advocates using the

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I really enjoyed reading The Richest Man in Town and feel confident that it will become a personal finance classic.  You can read my full The Richest Man in Town Book Review.  To help spread the word about this great book, I’m pleased to announce that I have three copies that I’ll be giving away in the next week.  Take one (or many) of the following steps by 5/24/2009:

The first copy will be given to one of my email subscribers.  The second will be given to one of my Twitter followers.  The third will be given to anyone who visits Richer by the Day and leaves a non-spam comment.  Even a simple ‘Count me in’ comment on this post would suffice, though you may want to browse through the site and leave a relevant comment on any interesting posts you find.  You can use all of the entry methods to be eligible for each copy.

For those hoping to score the copy going to a twitter follower, you can get an extra chance by tweeting (or retweeting my original twitter announcement) the following:

Free book (Richest Man in Town) to a follower http://tinyurl.com/olcjgc Follow by 5/24 RT for an extra entry #giveaway

This giveaway is a continuation of the renewed book focus I’ve taken here at Richer by the Day of late.  You may have noticed book reviews coming out nearly once a week.  I hope to continue this practice and offer as many book giveaways as possible.  So even if you aren’t selected for this giveaway, subscribe to my feed by email, follow me on twitter, and continue to visit Richer by the Day and leave comments to be eligible for future giveaways as well.

We’ve probably all be inundated with calls to our cell phones with prerecorded messages that our car warranty is expiring.  I covered this, and similar topics, in a recent post on the Lending Club blog: Cell Phone Telemarketing Scams.  Today, the Federal Trade Commision announced that it had filed suit to stop these illegal robocalls.

Highlights from the FTC press release:

The Federal Trade Commission is asking a federal court to shut down a telemarketing campaign that has been bombarding U.S. consumers with hundreds of millions of allegedly deceptive “robocalls” in an effort to sell them vehicle service contracts under the guise that they are extensions of original vehicle warranties.

In two related complaints filed in federal court, the Commission took action against both the promoter of the phony extended auto warranties, as well as the telemarketing company that it hired to carry out its illegal, deceptive campaign. In its complaints, the agency contends that the companies are operating a massive telemarketing scheme that uses random, pre-recorded phone calls to deceive consumers into thinking that their

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More on this topic (What's this?)

Blog Czar Is Next!? (EX-SKF, 6/22/09)

Virtual Vehicle Company: Unlocking Green Car Data With Cell Phones (Clean Energy Sector, 7/23/10)

Read more on First Trust Large Cap Growth Opportunities AlphaDEX Fund, Cell Phone Manufacturers at Wikinvest

It’s a good thing that we all know not to judge a book by its cover, or I may never have opened Rich Like Them by Ryan D’Agostino.  The cover pictured an opulent mansion.  To correlate such excess with being rich is exactly the type of sentiment that makes those of us in the personal finance realm cringe.  Often, such lavish housing accommodations indicate poor money management, rife with waste rather than financial acumen.  I’d rather hear from the owner of a modest home with no outstanding mortgage than a mansion dweller with mortgage debt larger than their faux marble foyers.

Reading the introduction, I quickly learned that the title was somewhat misleading.  The premise of the book was to uncover how it was that the inhabitants of impressive looking houses came to live there.  I suppose “Living in a Mansion Like Them” wouldn’t have been as catchy a title.  Even though the obvious continuation of the premise was that people living in such large houses might reveal previously undisclosed secrets of wealth, I was willing to overlook the potential flaw in that logic.

To realize his project, D’Agostino compiled a list of the 100 wealthiest zip codes in the US and then simply began knocking on doors in some of those locations.  More than five hundred houses later, he had met enough people to compile his project into Rich Like Them.

The most poignant takeaway from the book occurred in the first few pages.  Summarizing what he had learned from the people he met, D’Agostino reported that

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Ignore Everybody, and 39 Other Keys to Creativity doesn’t fit the genre of books normally reviewed here at Richer by the Day.  Some would say that creativity and personal finance have little in common.  I disagree.  Finding creative solutions to life’s challenges, financial or otherwise, is a beneficial skill.  You may even find that your creativity generates alternative income streams or the idea that becomes your life’s work.  My goal is to help readers of Richer by the Day enrich their lives, and improving your creative skills is one way to do that.

The series of events that led to Ignore Everybody seem to begin with Hugh MacLeod’s unconventional medium for his art.  His doodles and cartoons, on the backs of business cards, ultimately led to the creation of his blog, gapingvoid.com.  A shining achievement of gapingvoid.com was the wildly successful post, How to Be Creative.  By expanding on those ideas and others explored on the blog, Ignore Everybody captures the evolving wisdom of Hugh MacLeod on the subject of creativity.

With few other books on creativity under my belt, it’s hard to say where Ignore Everybody ranks.  I won’t even bother to critique the art, which requires a skill I’m even less qualified in.  What I can tell you are my impressions of the book as a whole and a few of the things I learned along the way.

Despite the title, the author clarifies that the best ideas (at least during the early phases) may seem too strange for others to ‘get it’.  And so you’ll need to ignore criticism and doubts of others and nurture the idea by yourself.  As success and acceptance slowly grow, you’ll be more able to rely on the support of others.

I completely agree with the analogy that

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Consumer Reports, the product testing magazine from Consumers Union is famous for separating the great products and services from the lousy ones.  They are decidedly pro-consumer and so I created a little experiment to put their own customer service to the test.

Last year I received an offer in the mail from Consumer Reports.  It was basically a flyer with some tips from past issues and a “no-obligation free trial” of the magazine.  According to the offer, I would receive a sample issue of the magazine plus two free books, How to Clean Practically Anything and the 2009 Buying Guide.

The offer said that my free books were truly FREE and that

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