Critical Thinking

Top 10 Critical Mistakes Homebuyers Make And How To Avoid Them (Part One)

1.Using an out-of-town lender.

Getting a mortgage in a timely and hassle-free manner is the “key that opens the door” to your new home.

Lenders who don’t live in the area you are buying in will not have the contacts needed to process your loan in an efficient and timely manner. Are you aware that if your lender fails to get you your loan on time, that your earnest money deposit may be at risk of being forfeited?

Your best bet is to ask your real estate agent whom they have used before and who they trust.

If it is important to you to use a lender from out-of-state (family member, friend etc.), your best bet is to have your lender refer your business to a local lender. This will help insure that your out-of-state lender receives a referral fee, they don’t violate state mortgage laws, and most importantly you are able to close on the home you want to buy.

Mortgage story: The very first transaction I was involved in after I got my real estate license was a nightmare due to a negligent lender. I was representing a buyer from Las Vegas (I live in St. George, Utah) that insisted on using a Las Vegas lender. Unfortunately the lender would rarely return calls or answer his phone. He failed to close on time. We extended the closing date time and again, and time and again the out-of-state lender failed to have the loan ready. The buyers were frantic and the sellers were angry. Finally eight weeks after we were supposed to close my buyers finally dropped the lousy lender and went with a local lender that I recommended. To my buyer’s amazement, by using the local lender, we closed the transaction 10 days later.

2.Not using a loan approval letter when making an offer on a property.

You’ve found “The Home” and want to make an offer to buy it. Now anybody can make a full price offer and get it accepted.

What if “The Home” is priced at $275,000 but you offer $250,000 and say that you will pay for the home by getting a new loan?

The sellers, when presented with your $250,000 offer, know nothing about you except that you seem to think their home is worth less than they feel its worth. At that point they will probably do one of two things. They might reject your offer outright. Or they might counter your offer at close to their asking price. As far as they’re concerned they never considered your original offer to be a “real” offer.

Do you think that they would have taken your $250,000 offer more seriously if you had said you could pay cash? Of course they would have, after all money talks.

What if you had already received full loan approval from a lender. Not just pre-qualified, or pre-approved (Being pre-approved is kinda like being pre-pregnant), but fully approved for a home loan with a letter from the underwriter to prove it. A letter that is as good as “cash in the bank”. You never know, maybe the seller would accept your offer, rather than letting a good buyer get away.

Wow, if your offer was accepted, you just saved $25,000 on the purchase of your home! And all you had to do was meet with the lender before you went house hunting.

3.Buying too much house for your income.

I used to do “Broker Price Opinions, or BPO” for banks. This is where a bank would contact me to find out the value of a home that they had given a loan on. Often times this “BPO” was because the homeowner was losing or had lost their home because they could no longer afford the home. What a terribly sad event for that family.

Things happen in life that you might never expect. Don’t unknowingly “open the door” to future foreclosure and bankruptcy by getting a mortgage that you can “grow into”. Life rarely works out the way you expect.

One of the best moves I’ve ever made was purchasing my current home. When I bought this home I qualified for a home twice as expensive as the one I bought. Payments on my home rarely cause me stress or concern.

4.Thinking “short-term”.

Want to really scare me? Tell me you want to buy a home today and that you will want sell it in two, three or four years. Yikes! Talk about wanting to lose money.

Real Estate home values generally rise very slowly in a slow or soft real estate market. In St. George, where I live, our average time between hot markets (when home values rise quickly, usually doubling) is ten years. If you bought $250,000 home in a slow market, in three years it might be worth $265,000. Your cost to sell with commission and other costs would be $18,200. You would lose $8,200 for your short term thinking.

If you have to move within three years of buying a home, it would be better to use the home as a rental for a few years, and sell it when the market will allow you to make a profit. Better yet rent it out until the top of the next hot market, then sell it and potentially make $250,000 profit.

5.Using 1031 exchange money to buy personal property.

Do you really want to risk having the IRS charge you with fraud? Enough said.

This article is continued in Top 10 Critical Mistakes Homebuyers Make and How to Avoid Them, Part 2…

Don Glasgow
http://www.articlesbase.com/advertising-articles/top-10-critical-mistakes-homebuyers-make-and-how-to-avoid-them-part-one-67409.html

What are the six steps of critical thinking?

What are the six steps involved in doing critical thinking?

They are: knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis and evaluation.

Benefits of Online Nursing Degree Programs

If you are interested in entering the health-care industry, nursing is one profession to consider. With the growing demand for nurses in medical institutions, corporate and private agencies, you will find a varied number of job opportunities available to you. Work hours are normally flexible and Nurses receive high salaries, excellent work benefits, and are generally assured of job security.

Nowadays, you can receive training in nursing through online degree programs. The online courses are considered on par with degrees from regular nursing schools and are accepted by most employers. Check out the different nursing degree programs that are available online.

There are various benefits in going for online nursing degree programs:

Study at your own convenience:

With online degree programs, you save the time and money spent in commuting and can study from the comfort of your own home and complete the course at your own pace. You can choose from a variety of different online nursing degree programs and take your time to finish the course or accelerate through the work and get your degree earlier.

Since online nursing degree programs require a good deal of self-discipline and motivation to complete, they foster critical thinking and independent decision making skills. These abilities are valued by employers as it is very necessary for nurses to be competent and confident on the job.

Get acquainted with the latest technologies:

Online degree programs are conducted entirely over the Internet and usually make use of the latest digital technologies. This will give you a hands-on experience in the use of new software and applications. You will find this of immense help in your later career as most hospitals and medical centers have gone digital and now use computer technology on a very wide scale – from keeping digital medical records to monitoring patients to running life support systems and much more.

Improve your communication and cross-cultural skills:

Nurses with multilingual abilities and experience in dealing with different people of different cultures are especially in demand in the health-care industry. Here online nursing degree programs can help you a great deal as students participating in online degree programs come from all over the world and from varied social background. Regular interactions with your fellow students from abroad will probably give you a pretty good insight on their social, cultural, political, and economic issues. This will come to good use in communicating well with medical colleagues, doctors, hospital administrators, and patients later on, all of whom are sure to come from wide strata of society.

Namita Awasthi
http://www.articlesbase.com/online-education-articles/benefits-of-online-nursing-degree-programs-114946.html

How to Write a Critical Book Review

To let you understand what a critical book review is, let’s define firstly what is a book review itself? Book review is an academic paper that gives an analysis of a book based on content, style, and merits. To make a book review critical, you should add more personal judgments and evaluations. It is very important to understand the book completely in order to write a good book review. Now, let’s divide your critical book reviewing into steps.

Even before an actual reading, study the table of contest and chapter titles, read the preface. It will help you to understand a book’s structure and writer’s way of thinking. You should study the writer’s biography to understand the reason of his writing. It might be good to read others critical reviews. Take some notes while reading, then you will use them for your outline. Find a way you are going to criticize, then revise your notes and eliminate all that doesn’t relate to your future thesis.

First thing you have to do, is to write a draft. Think about what will go into your introduction, body and conclusion. For example in the intro you can analyze the potential target audiences. Tell about the author’s purpose in writing the book and what have influenced him/her to write the book. Show your overall opinion of the book. In a few words explain the basis of your opinion and state the main thesis.

In the body of the review you start to evaluate the book. This evaluation should contain your arguments that support your thesis. Here you can identify the author’s main thesis and agree or disagree with them. Try to discuss not only the author’s point of view, but the accuracy of the facts, the use of the language and writing style. Comment all these by using quotations from the text, so that your book review reader would understand right away your idea. You can criticize by answering such questions as: Is the book lacking of argumentation or information, that in your opinion has to be? Are the ideas logical and easy to follow? How skillfully does the author use vocabulary, explains and supports his own arguments? Is there anything that is missing in the book? Does it need illustration? Don’t make any offensive statements here. In general you can find lots of information from the book to criticize. Be creative and remember that you have always to prove and explain your statements.

In the conclusion you should summarize your main thesis. On the ground of your short summary tell about your expectation. Were they met? What have you learnt from this book? There is a good way of an impressive end. Imagine that you could meet the author of the book and tell about your possible conversation. This will leave your review reader ran information to think about.

After you will be done with the draft, proofread it. Check for grammar and punctuation errors, for errors in your quotations, and for your logical development. Ideally, you should leave your first draft for a day or two before revising. Then you will be more open minded and will be more objective in checking. This might lead even to some radical changes of your paper’s plot.

Jennifer Burns
http://www.articlesbase.com/ebooks-articles/how-to-write-a-critical-book-review-130908.html

A Critical Element in Writing Articles

The first time I decided to write an article for an ezine I was quite excited. I had written technical articles earlier for print media therefore I thought this would be an easy task.

But I was in for a surprise. Although I knew what I wanted to write I just could not complete my article even after working on it for two full days. Several times I started writing and then scratched what I had written.

On the third day I decided to take some help. I searched Google on how to write articles and got advice from several sites. Then I summarized what I had learned and wrote two points for my guidance.

1.Write as if you are talking to one single person.
2.Initially just keep writing whatever comes to your mind. Later you can organize the article and do grammar and spelling.

I thought I had found the magic formula. But I was still struggling with my writing. Just then Hari, a friend of mine, came to my house. He looked at me once and understood that I was in some deep trouble. He asked what was troubling me and I told him about my predicament.

Then he wanted to know the subject of my article

I said that it was something about mind control.

He was rather surprised and asked me why it was so important.

I said that it was important because just by modifying your thinking process you can transform your life and change you destiny. I added that this theory did not seem to be working for me.

Like this we set up a conversation. He asked me questions and I replied. But I did not notice that he was writing the points on a paper. After about 20 minutes he handed me that paper and said that there was my article.

On the sheet of paper he had written down the main points as we had discussed. I immediately saw that not only I had the content for my article but the content was also logically arranged. I thanked him and said that I would finish the article by the evening.

He said that I had to finish the article immediately and send it to the ezine within one hour.

I started writing the article feverishly. Within 15 minutes I wrote about one and half pages and completed the article. Then I started typing like mad. And I was able to submit the article shortly afterwards.

From this experience I wrote my third and the most vital guiding point.

3.Be your own customer.

Now I find that this theory works well in many areas not only in writing articles. Before you get down to write the article imagine that your customer, who in this case is your reader, is sitting in front of you.

You talk to him about the article and as your imaginary conversation continues you write down the points. And there you have the blueprint for your article.

This approach makes you think from the perspective of your customer. This way you do not see what you are offering but you see how your offer looks like.

Look at it this way. You are writing articles for others to read. Why will others read your articles? They will read if there is good content and it is properly arranged. If you want to see how your article appears to your reader, come out of yourself and critically look at your article as if you are the reader and not the writer. When you look at your article from a distance you get a much wider picture.

Sanjay Johari
http://www.articlesbase.com/non-fiction-articles/a-critical-element-in-writing-articles-53616.html

Indoctrination/Critical Thinking

More information:

http://www.noindoctrination.org/

http://www.criticalthinking.org/

http://www.badscience.net/

http://www.sciencedaily.com/

http://www.public.asu.edu/~sheilrod/

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