Hello. Remember me? My name is Helga. I am the Eastern European dominatrix who performs the voice of Dan’s computer. How are you? Whatever.

As you are probably guessing by now, Dan has no new episode of The Bitterest Pill for you this week. Even though he promised he would do a new show once a week, he’s already letting you down. I hope you’re not surprised. If you are surprised, you are a bigger idiot than Dan is.

I am going to warn you, he is going to claim it’s because he has no voice. He will make some excuse about being sick this week, and coughing all the time, and having no voice. It’s all bull crap. He’s been yelling at those kids all week, and seemed to do that just fine…

Download Helga Rules: Free Abuse

For the past few months, I have been giving you advice on how to manage a foreclosure situation that you might find yourself in. But what if you are on the other side of the fence and you are constantly trying to find a cheap property to invest in? How would you go about finding a foreclosure property?

1. Check out a couple of the new online services like propertyshark.com, foreclosurefreesearch.com and foreclosure.com . These foreclosure listing sites provide the latest foreclosures in your area and often include the amount owed and the estimated value. Both of these websites provide a free trial so you can test the site out before you commit to their paid service. Very useful websites even though they cost money.
2. Unless you’re an experienced investor, you should skip for now the public foreclosure auctions. These auctions are mainly controlled by financial institutions so there are slim chances that you will get a good deal on a foreclosure property. The online websites actually have a feature that will show the properties that will go into default. During that time there is a brief window to negotiate directly with the property owner which is your chance to get the property before it even hits a public foreclosure auction.
3. First thing you should do is to get in touch with the default property’s owner. If they have a lawyer, feel free to contact them as well. Your goal here is to ask the owner if there is any way to negotiate a purchase of their property before it goes into auction. Remember, DO NOT only negotiate with the lawyer because he basically has no interest to work out a deal before the property goes into foreclosure.
4. If the owner is willing to work out a deal then the next step is to negotiate the price and terms. There are a few occasions when the owner might want to partner up with you. How does it work? Well, you can start by paying the mortgage-backed payments to get the loan out of default. Once you fix up the house and sell it, you give the owner a check for a portion of the profit.

Of course, there are many other way to get a foreclosure property and the amount of websites that offer these kind of properties are increasing every day, but the above points should be a good starting point for you.

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Related Articles at Real Estate Blog:

• States with the highest foreclosure rate
• Top 5 factors for increase in the foreclosures numbers
• Foreclosure Relief Plan
• Should You Buy a Foreclosed Property?
• Is your mortgage too high? Weigh these options

Database of contemporary social issues with content structured to promote critical-thinking skills and information literacy. This online library that allows students to investigate current issues and topics from a number of perspectives.

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Some thoughts for a Friday.

• New housing prices continue to hold steady with a 6.1% year over year price increase according to Stats Canada (up to November 2007). Most expensive year over year jumps were in Saskatoon, Regina, Edmonton and Winnipeg. How do you young folk afford these prices?
• Spent over 3/4 of an hour updating my Quicken accounts yesterday for my kids’ RESP accounts. TD Canada Trust’s Easyline Mutual fund on line interface really does need an ability to download transaction into Quicken or Microsoft Money. If anyone knows someone at TD Canada Trust, please put that on a wish list. It would be nice if you could do that for Canada Savings Bonds too!
• Unemployment numbers remained steady at 2.1% for December (year over year), however Employment slipped a little. Still amazing numbers to see given I remember unemployment numbers much higher when I started working.
• Monday things should look different here, well not here, but over at Blogspot, stay tuned, hopefully it all works smoothly.

Enjoy your weekend

Godtube.com has an Alexa traffic rank of 8,136, and Beliefnet.com has an Alexa traffic rank of 9,905.

Rightly so, Michael Arrington from TechCrunch.com emphasizes that God is hot on the web, be it for a web portal like Godtube, similar to YouTube with videos for Christians or the Jesus types, or Beliefnet.com bought by NewsCorp recently, a site that features religion, spirituality faith, health, prayer, the Bible, and a holistic lifestyle.

Lifeinthefishbowl is going to be one awesome free online dating site, predicts Michael Arrington in a funny way. Yeah right, as awesome as Hot Enough, if I may add to the fun!

Someone out there commented, “hey, that’s a nice idea… different faiths can have their own social networks and I can chose my religion depending of which network has the hottest chicks!” 

Jokes apart, dividing an audience for a niche audience is one thing, but dividing an audience over narrow perspectives  of race, religion, looks, etc. are sure recipes for failure in this day and age where most people have broader outlooks than that… my two cents.

As an addendum to the previous post on the anatomy of a WordPress site, I wanted to mention a new feature of WordPress 2.1.

Choosing your Front or “Home” page.

WordPress 2.1 now allows you to choose any of your “static” pages as your home page. So that when users first visit your site, they will see a static “home” page, then proceed to your blog area if they choose to.

This is a great feature for those who wish to use WordPress as their main Website, and want more of a classic Website look and structure.