In 2006, my husband and I bought our first rental property. We put 10 percent down ($8,500) on a small brick ranch in the same Midwestern community that we call home. I had gotten my real estate license several years prior, so I had some basic knowledge to build from. We still weren't 100 percent sure about what it meant to be a landlord, but we thought that it would be a great opportunity to build long-term wealth. We also hoped that the home would provide a passive income stream for us once it was paid off. A few months later, we converted our starter home into our second rental, and we bought and moved into our third home, where we currently reside.

So, there we were - 27 years old, with two rental properties and high hopes that everything would turn out as planned. Another landlord we know gave us a copy of his lease to use, and we got lots of advice from other friends who own rental property. We placed ads in the local newspaper and signs in the yards of both homes. Luckily, they both rented out quickly for the amount that we asked without much effort. We were young, dumb, and in love...and we thought that we were real estate moguls!

Fixer-upper (noun). A home you purchase at a reasonable price, but one that requires an unreasonable amount of money in repairs and renovations.

Okay, so I made up that definition, and it's not always true. Buying fixer-uppers can get you more house than you would normally be able to afford at a reasonable price. They can be pleasantly inexpensive. But they can also be money pits, masquerading behind a façade of charming woodwork and arched doorways.

As tempting as the purchase price is for houses that need a little TLC, you must assess whether a fixer-upper is right for you. To do that, you need an appraisal. And I'm not just talking about the house. Continue reading...

Bill had to sell his house quickly.

He was being transferred out of state, and the company wasn't footing the bill. Instead, they offered him a higher salary. Now he had to sell quickly or risk paying two mortgages.

I asked, as I sometimes do, what personal finance question my friends and Twitter followers had for me. It was a slow day on the internet and the responses flooded in.

My friend Neil asked, "what do you think about real estate?" A broad question, indeed, and I got him to clarify. "You know... should I buy a house? Why not just rent?"

Why not indeed.

After finding holes in our second set of seven-year-old sheets, I decided it was time to go sheet shopping. With quality ranging from my elastic-only-in-the-corners polyester blend to sheets created by Italian artisans and prices to match, I wanted to get the best, most durable set for my money.

The Cotton Tale

After inspecting the labels of all my sheet sets, I found my favorites were made of 100% cotton.

And I'm in good company, because cotton makes up the majority of bedding options. But not all cottons are equal. The length of cotton fibers (called the “staple”) differs and, in general, the longer the fiber length, the softer and more durable the fabric.

Here at the Koke-Long house we're in the market for some furniture. Our living room is currently semi-furnished with a comfortable but deteriorating Ikea couch and some leftover dining chairs; we'd like a nice armchair or two and some tables.

I've mostly gone for Ikea 'cheap and new' furniture in the past, but I've been disappointed by its (understatement alert!) lack of durability. This time I'd like to try buying used but higher-quality. As I began to look around, though, I realized that I knew very little about what makes for a strong, long-lasting piece of furniture.

Anyone can identify a rip, scratch, or stain, or decide whether they like a certain color, without special knowledge. But judging whether a piece is likely to last two years or twenty — just by looking at it — is harder stuff. Time to research! Here's an overview of what I learned, with a checklist at the end.

Over the past few months, I've occasionally used the "Ask the Readers" feature at Get Rich Slowly to poll people about their budgets and spending habits. So far, I've asked folks to share their spending on food, clothes, gifts, and health insurance. Now I want to look at a bigger item in your budget — probably the biggest. Let's talk about how much you spend on housing.

More than other expenses, your housing costs are influenced by where you live. Some parts of the country — and some parts of the world — are much cheaper to buy a home or to rent an apartment. It's cheaper to live in Boise, Idaho, for instance, than to live in New York City. Generally, however, there are reasons for these price disparities. Most people are willing to pay more to live in New York than in Boise, and that drives prices higher. It's a trade-off.

I'm a firm believer in the Balanced Money Formula, which says that if you pay too much for housing, you'll have less to spend on other wants and needs, and you'll always feel pinched, as if you can't afford anything. On the other hand, if you limit your housing expense to below 25% of your take-home pay, you should have lots of breathing room.

I've dropped a rather obscene amount of money on bodywork in the last few years. I've had an evolving team of chiropractors, massage therapists, and acupuncturists. I've bought books on physical therapy exercises. Some things have worked, others have not. In the end, the pain always comes back.

I have chronic shoulder pain. My arms also frequently go numb in the middle of the night. I don't mean they tingle, I mean sometimes I literally cannot move my arm. I have to use my functioning hand to reposition it and get blood flowing back into the limb. It's kinda scary.

Two (Life-Changing?) Questions

When my shoulder bothers me enough, I usually get a massage to alleviate the pain. It's a temporary fix — I know a 60-minute massage can't cure a chronic problem that's probably caused by structure and daily habits. But recently a new (to me) massage therapist asked me two questions that no one else had asked. First, she asked if I grind my teeth at night. Yes, I have in the past, and I have a TMJ (temporomandibular joint) disorder. She firmly suggested that I started wearing my night guard consistently, and in the past five days the pain has gone from a constant ache to a mild annoyance. Continue reading...

When my husband and I got married nine years ago, we had an audacious dream of paying cash for our first home. At that time, it was very much a far-off dream — we were just trying to survive the rigors and expenses of law school without going in debt. That alone was a seemingly gigantic feat.

But after three years of law school, my husband did graduate without debt, passed the bar, and we started planning for the future. Since we'd been renting for almost four years, my husband had a good job, and our second baby was on the way, pretty much everyone expected that buying a house would be in our immediate future.

I mean, after all, isn't buying a house the responsible thing for a young couple to do? Well, maybe — or maybe not. We didn't have much money in savings, and we weren't sure how long we would be living in the town we were in, so we chose to go against conventional wisdom and continued renting.

I've lived in a small town for most of my life. The drive home includes steep hills with panoramic views and winding country roads that ramble past ranches and wide-open fields.

But I didn't always have positive feelings about the country life. In high school, I hated it. All of the action was in the city, where coffee shops, museums, restaurants, and concerts happened. When I moved to the city my freshman year of college, I thought that would be the end of country living — I was finally a city mouse.

As it turned out, after seven years in the city, I did move back. It began as a purely financial decision, and one that, at the time, made me feel a twinge of anxiety. I remember that as my husband and I were packing up our apartment in town to get ready for the move, I had a mini meltdown, asking him, “Are you sure you want to do this? Are you really sure you want to do this?" (He probably thought I was nuts since the whole thing was my idea, but he's a wise man and kept that to himself, simply saying that yes, he was sure.)