This is a guest post by Bruce Hyland.

It used to be that buying a home was simple. You would take out your 30-year, fixed rate mortgage and that would be that. 30 years of the same payment later, and the house was yours. These days things are much more complicated. You’ve got FHA loans, VA loans, Jumbo mortgages, Adjustable Rate mortgages, and many more. You can get dizzy just thinking about all of your options.

In this article I will be writing about 4 types of mortgages that are a little unique and that you may not be aware of.

First, let’s make sure we’ve got the basics down pat. What is a mortgage? According to Wikipedia, a mortgage is:

A mortgage loan is a loan secured by real property through the use of a mortgage note which evidences the existence of the loan and the encumbrance of that realty through the granting of a mortgage which secures the loan. However, the word mortgage alone, in everyday usage, is most often used to mean mortgage loan.
A home buyer or builder can obtain financing (a loan) either to purchase or secure against the property from a financial institution, such as a bank, either directly or indirectly through intermediaries. Features of mortgage loans such as the size of the loan, maturity of the loan, interest rate, method of paying off the loan, and other characteristics can vary considerably.

Here are 4 unique types of mortgages:

Streamlined 203(k) Limited Repair Program
FHA’s Streamlined 203(k) program permits homebuyers to finance up to an additional $35,000 into their mortgage to improve or upgrade their home before move-in. With this new product, homebuyers can quickly and easily tap into cash to pay for property repairs or improvements, such as those identified by a home inspector or FHA appraiser.

Bridge / Swing Loans
Bridge loans are also called swing loans. They are used when you have a home for sale and need the proceeds from the sale to purchase a new home.

If your current home doesn’t sell in time, you can get a bridge loan, which uses that home as collateral and allows you to close on the new house.

A bridge loan pays off the old mortgage and goes toward the down payment on the new home. When the old home does sell, you pay off the bridge loan and continue paying the traditional mortgage on the new home.

Equity Mortgage Loan Types
Home equity loans are typically junior loans and should not be confused with a basic refinance, which means paying off an existing mortgage and replacing it with another loan. Refinances can take 30 days or more to process. Home equity loans fund fairly quickly and are subordinate to an existing first mortgage. In other words, an equity loan falls into second position.

The lender’s security for the loan is your home, meaning if you go into default and do not make your mortgage payments or otherwise abide by the terms of the loan, the lender has the right to foreclose.

Reverse Mortgages
Reverse mortgage are available to any person over the age of 62 who has enough equity. Instead of making monthly payments to the lender, the lender makes monthly payments to the borrower for as long as the borrower resides in the home. The interest rate can be fixed or adjustable. Wondering if a reverse mortgage is for you? There are a variety of reverse mortgage calculators available to help you decide.

These are just 4 types of mortgages, there are probably hundreds more. What kind of mortgage do you have?

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Post from: John's Jottings

4 Types of Mortgages You May Not Know About

This is a guest post by Lisa Rollins.

Looking for a new place to holiday this winter? Sick of the same old destinations you and your family have traveled to over the last few years? Break out of your rut and explore something new! Here are some travel destination ideas for your next get away.

Crete
Crete is the biggest island of Greece and the second biggest (after Cyprus) of the East Mediterranean. It separates the Aegean from the Libyan sea and marks the boundary between Europe and Africa. Crete covers an area of 8.336 km2. The length of the island is 260 km, while the shore-length is 1.046 km. Majestic mountains rise in its centre – the White mountains, Psiloritis, Dikti. Its plateaus are split by deep gorges and end up in fertile valleys.

Here are the top 3 things to do on Crete holidays:

1. Visit Aquaworld Aquarium, Hersonissos
2. Enjoy Elafonissi Beach, Elafonissi
3. Take Cooking Lessons In Vamos, Vamos

Las Vegas
Las Vegas is the most populous city in Nevada, United States and the seat of Clark County. Las Vegas is an internationally renowned major resort city for gambling, shopping, and fine dining. The city bills itself as The Entertainment Capital of the World, and is famous for its casino resorts and associated entertainment.

Here are the top 3 things to do on Las Vegas holidays:

1. Gamble, of course!
2. See a show (I recommend a Cirque du Soleil show)
3. Visit the Fremont Street Experience

Turkey
Turkey, known officially as the Republic of Turkey, is a Eurasian country located in Western Asia (mostly in the Anatolian peninsula) and in East Thrace in Southeastern Europe.

In Turkey every visitor can find something for themselves. The world class cuisine, vibrant cities, warm hospitality, recreational facilities, historical attractions, cultural heritage, over 8000 km’s coastline & an unparallel natural beauty make Turkey an irresistible holiday destination for independent or group travelers.

Here are the top 3 things to do on Turkey holidays:

1. Tour the Hagia Sophia Museum / Church in Ayasofya, Istanbul
2. Check out Aqua Fantasy Land, Kusadasi
3. Be amazed by The Great Mosque, Ulu Camii

I hope this article has given you some ideas for where you may spend your next vacation or holiday. Remember to enjoy yourself and go off the beaten path – it is always more fun to explore out on your own.

Good luck and have fun!

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Post from: John's Jottings

3 Top Vacation Spots

This is a guest post by Sarah Tipton.

If you are a broke college student like me that still likes to travel and see this great country of ours (or some other country perhaps!) then you know how challenging it can be to do so on a limited budget. I have found a number of methods that have worked for me and I’d like to share them with you in the hopes that you too can benefit from these cost-saving ideas.

Of course depending on your destination and travel plans you may not need all of these tips, but hopefully they will each be useful to you at some point in time.

In this guide I will be sharing my favorite options for getting the best prices on airfare, rental cars and hotels.

Airfare

My favorite site for getting the best deals on airfare is Kayak.com. The site is very easy to use because it was founded by tech executive cofounders of Expedia, Travelocity and Orbitz. The way I use their site is I enter my start and ending destination and then I use the calendar to view when the best deals are.

One of the really neat things on Kayak is their trends page, which is a really fun way to get some travel destination ideas. As I am writing this the number one trending destination is Belize City. Cool! Too rich for my blood but a neat idea nonetheless.

Rental Cars

My favorite new option for a discount car rental is U-Save. Unlike the big company names like Enterprise, National and Avis these guys believe that cheap car rental can be accompanied with excellent service. While this broke student needs the cheap rates she also appreciates good service.

My favorite feature on their site is their stripped down mobile site that works great on my mobile phone. Hopefully they will have an iPhone app soon!

Hotels

For cheap hotel options I have had the best luck with Priceline.com. You probably know them from the “Priceline Negotiator” television ads featuring William Shatner from Star Trek fame. By far the best feature of the their site is their name your own price option. All you have to do is select where you want to stay, how many stars you want your hotel to be and what price you are willing to pay. They will then match you up with a hotel meeting your price and specifications. Sweet! Cheap travel at it’s best. Of course, don’t expect to be matched up to any hotel if you choose $1. You need to be realistic.

I hope these tips were helpful to you and I wish you bon voyage on your next low-cost travel adventure!

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Post from: John's Jottings

A Student’s Guide to Cheap Travel

This is a guest post by Bill Graves.

If you run a warehouse, freight company, or any other type of industrial business, reliable floor scales are essential tools in helping you keep accurate records of your loads and providing reliable services to your customers.

There are a variety of uses for floor scales in an industrial setting. In this post I will be outlining some different options for industrial floor scales.

Warehouse shipping & receiving platform scales

If you manage the warehouse shipping & receiving function then you know the importance of technology in keeping your job area running in perfect condition. You use a number of pieces of equipment to do so including barcode scanners, rfid tags, label printers and of course, platform scales. A solid, reliable platform scale is of the utmost importance is you verify the weights of the products coming into and out of your warehouse.

Pallet weighing products

While it is important to be able to weigh your incoming and outgoing pallets it is even more important to do so quickly. Time is of the essence in manufacturing. That’s why the best investment you can make is in a pallet weighing product such as a forklift scale. This allows you to use your forklift as you normally would to move pallets but to also be able to get a weighing at the same time, without having to set the pallet down on a floor scale. Very efficient time savings!

Drum weighing products

If your goods are stored in 55-gallnon drums then there are a number of scales that are designed just for that task. Features you may want to look for include a diamond plate top deck, self-leveling, shock absorbing feet and a scale capacity of 2,500 pounds. I suggest you get one that is outdoor rated and don’t forget a digital indicator and all required cables and cords.

I hope this article helped make clear the options in industrial floor scales. If you are looking for floor scales for sale you will find online a number of different vendors offering solid pieces of equipment. Do your due diligence and find the best vendor for your floor scale needs.

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Post from: John's Jottings

Industrial Floor Scale Options

This is a guest post by Matt McGuire.

One of the things people are always asking is if it is better to play poker in online poker rooms, or should they play in a real casino. The answer is mixed. Some people prefer online, while others lean towards the real casinos.

The reality is that there are pros and cons to both types of poker rooms.

Virtual Poker Rooms

The biggest advantage to playing poker in online room such as Full Tilt is convenience. You don’t have to worry about getting all dressed up, or if your car is going to make it to and from the casino, or if you should plan on spending the night. Since you don’t leave the house, none of these questions are relevant. If you have ten or twenty minutes to kill, all you have to do is log onto your account and you can start to play. Another perk is that you are the only person who knows that you are gambling.

Since online casinos are now offering tournaments; many of which can be used to qualify for larger, real world tournaments like the World Series of Poker. This gives more people a chance to qualify, but it also means that they are not learning how to read people, making it much more difficult for them to be able to read body language and know how to bluff when they get to the actual tournament.

Real Poker Rooms

The biggest problem with real world casinos is that they are not always located close to someone’s house, they are usually a destination. This means that the person has to plan when they are going to play, how they are going to get there, what they are going to wear, and how much money they are going to spend. On the other hand there are lots of advantages to the real poker rooms.

When you play poker in a real casino as opposed to PokerStars, you get to socialize while you are playing. You are meeting people; this means that even if you have lost all of your money playing cards, you have at least gotten something out of the night. When a person goes to a real casino they usually spend less. They know exactly how much money they have in their pocket and when that is gone, they quit playing. When a person is playing online, it is very easy to use credit cards to pad a dwindling bank roll and then promptly lose track of how much money you have post.

Most of the professional poker players, who regularly win big, are playing online at PokerStars.net, but they also make an effort to play several games each month at a real casino as well. The reason for this is simple. They have to be able to read body language. This is a skill that can only be developed by watching actual people and not staring at a computer screen.

The best thing you can do is try playing in both situations and then deciding which is going to best suit you.

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1. Are You Ready to Play in Online Poker Tournaments? This is a guest post by Matt McGuire. There are lots of amateur poker player who dream of playing in...

Post from: John's Jottings

Real vs. Virtual Poker Rooms

This is a guest post by Matt McGuire.

There are lots of amateur poker player who dream of playing in a tournament. At least that is the smaller dream they have. The big dream is to play in the World Series of Poker, but for many that is nothing more than a pipe dream. However, it is possible to play in a real tournament and possibly even find yourself in competition with a professional.

The sheer number of online poker rooms, such as FullTiltPoker is forcing each one to be more competitive. One of the things the casinos have recently discovered is that their members love tournaments. As a result, the casinos are offering more and more of them. Some of the tournaments provide an opportunity to play in a real world tournament that is help in an actual casino. Other tournaments are just played for a big pot of money and bragging rights. Some of the online tournaments are actually qualifying events, winning them means that you would earn a seat at a bigger tournament like the World Series of Poker.

The decision to participate in an online poker tournament should not be one that you make lightly. It requires a great deal of thought, preparation, and honesty.

Before you sign up for the tournament, you need to read the rules carefully. Things that you will want to pay careful attention to include the dates and times that the tournament will be played, how much the buy-in is, and what the winnings are.

Once you have processed all this information you need to take a long hard look at your life and decide if you can realistically participate. The first issue that needs to be dealt with is if you can afford the buy in, if you can play on a free tournament at FullTiltPoker.net, or if it would mean that you would have to sacrifice something else that your family needs. If the answer is no, you should wait until another, more affordable tournament rolls around.

Next you have to consider the timing of the event. Tournaments go on for a long time. Some online casinos run them straight through, never stopping, until someone has won. Other poker rooms simply set up a time (i.e. every Sunday night at 4:30pm) when participants are expected to show up and play or forfeit. Can you realistically commit yourself to logging onto the game until the end?

Before you commit yourself to playing in a tournament, you need to be realistic about your abilities. Tournaments attract good players, who are committed to winning. If you are not consistently winning the Full Tilt Poker games that you play in, than you probably are not going to be ready for the tournament. To help you access the type of player you will be playing against, you should log onto the casino forums and ask, or check out the casino records, where they should have information about the previous winners. There is no point getting in over your head. Instead work on honing your poker skills so that when the next tournament rolls around you will be ready to compete.

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Post from: John's Jottings

Are You Ready to Play in Online Poker Tournaments?

This is a guest post by Simon Barnett.

Poker seems to be in the news more right now than it has ever been before. There’s complete television coverage of many leading events and the top poker players are becoming household names.

There’s something particularly appealing about the game. We may be attracted by the thought of making big money and having the option to replicate the lifestyles of those leading players. Becoming a professional poker player and being able to travel the world can certainly seem very appealing.

Making money from poker

But can poker be seen as a serious means of generating income? Sure, we can see that people who have been playing the game for years can become good at it and make some money as a result. But is it only a select few who are truly successful?

What about the chances for those of us who have never played poker before? Is there a chance for us to make money within a reasonable time period?

Given that I take a keen interest in all aspects of personal finance, I’ve become interested in the possibility of seeing poker as an investment opportunity. Can we really compare the game to other investments, such as buying stocks and shares?

In order to find out, the first step would be to learn how to play the game.

Learning the game

I started my quest by checking out a few poker websites that explained the basics. The first thing that becomes clear is that poker is full of terminology. This can be incredibly confusing for a beginner.

I spent an entire weekend reading up on the terminology and trying to get some basic hints and tips. I was interested to know about the most common mistakes that amateur players make. That was because I was keen to avoid them.

By the end of the weekend, I could talk with limited confidence about small blinds, flops and top pairs. I was becoming more familiar with some key concepts, but I was also aware that I had absolutely no experience of playing the game. Everything that I had learnt to this point had been purely theoretical.

It was now time to put things into practice!

Playing for the first time

The rise of online poker websites means that the game has become incredibly accessible. If you have a credit card and internet access then you can pretty much find opponents at any hour of the day.

I signed up to one such site. It’s worth pointing out that most of the main poker websites offer a sign-up bonus for new players. You can compare the offers that are available.

In my case, I decided that I’d start out by playing some free games. This had the advantage of allowing me to check out the basics, without risking any money at this point.

I was soon glad that I’d taken this approach. Playing the game for the first time made me realise that it would really take some getting used to.

For starters, you have to get to grips with the interface of your chosen website. This is particularly important when you come to place your bets. You also realise that the game is very fast moving. You’re required to think extremely quickly.

In truth, this all came as something of a shock to me. Since I was working full-time during the days, my poker playing opportunities were largely limited to evenings. I spent the whole of my first week playing free games. I was determined that I should become reasonably good before moving on to play for real money.

By the end of that first week, I was winning more free chips than I was losing. I thought that I had become pretty good. I was confident that I’d now be able to start winning real money. I was wrong!

Playing for real

Although I was winning these free games, it soon become obvious that playing for real money was completely different. The entire style of play was transformed. Opponents simply didn’t risk their chips in the same way. As a result, everything seemed completely unpredictable.

It was also clear that I was now facing players with a far greater degree of experience. I was facing some stiff competition. I was soon losing consistently.

After 10 days of consistently losing money in this way, I realised that I needed to go back to the drawing board. My approach wasn’t working. This wasn’t an investment opportunity. It was a way of handing over my money!

I decided to start looking more closely at poker strategies and I opted to purchase a couple of books.

There are numerous books out there and they all proposed different systems of play.

I’d generally been playing a version of the game called Texas Hold’em. Since I understood the basics of this version of the game, I concentrated my efforts of learning more detailed strategies.

I took that decision one month ago and I’ve been trying to put some new strategies in place. Has it worked? I would say that I’m now breaking even. That’s better than I was doing at the outset, but it’s not going to make me rich any time soon.

It’s clear to me that becoming good and profitable at poker will take many months.

Getting better

With hindsight, I wish that I’d read the strategy books sooner. They might have saved me some money, although it would have been difficult to follow the concepts without any experience of playing the game.

I also think that it would help to play the game in a real life situation. Playing online does mean that you can play a lot of poker. But I think that it would be helpful to learn from an experienced player.

I’m sure that it is possible to make money playing poker. But I’m not sure that I have enough time to become successful!

Simon Barnett writes about consumer and personal finance issues. He had no previous experience of playing poker and carried out his experiment earlier this year.

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Post from: John's Jottings

How quickly can you learn poker?

American psychologist Abraham Harold Maslow proposed in 1954 that man’s needs, in order, are physiological needs such as food, water, and sleep; safety and security; love and belongingness; esteem; and self-actualization (a state of realizing man’s own greatest potential). This theory, called the “hierarchy of needs,” is still being used today in psychology and health studies. Safety is second in the list so it is a legitimate need.

If you think about it, car insurance really is all about safety. The business of selling car insurance policies—or any other insurance policy, for that matter—profits off the need of people to feel safe about their own lives, the lives of their family, and their vehicles. But that’s not to say car insurance quotes from companies are only taking advantage of us and robbing us of cash. You might be the most careful and law-abiding driver in the world, but the rest of the world’s populace aren’t. So even though there’s little chance that you’ll get into an accident while taking a drive, a risk, albeit a very low one, still exists, and you want to be prepared for when that risk becomes a reality.

So what kind of safety are you getting from your car insurance policy exactly? Your policy promises coverage for car repairs and even legal representation for when charges are filed against you. In cases of car or car part theft, the same coverage applies. Your insurer experiences the headache you should be experiencing while handling all that, only they do it better because of years of experience in the industry of taking care of vehicles. You only have to pay your insurer a monthly premium and maybe a few additional charges in certain cases of accidents.

So again, it all goes back to the issue of safety. Car insurance is all about making you, as a car owner safe. It comes with a price, yes, but if you’re that very careful, law-abiding driver cited earlier as an example, you can actually get discounts. The lower your risk of getting into accidents or your car getting stolen—all pertaining to how good a driver you are and the completeness of your car’s safety and security features—the lower your premium. But whether it’s cheap or not, it does you good to purchase a policy…and quite frankly, you might really have to get one because most states require it.

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Post from: John's Jottings

Safety and Car Insurance