About The Book SMART ESSENTIALS FOR BUYING A HOME shares everything you ever need to know to buy a home...and skips the filler you don't need. We know your time is precious. In this SMART ESSENTIALS you'll find concise, practical, insider buying strategies to accomplish six smart steps that every home buyer must get right: Find the right TEAM of buyer's agent and mortgage pro to be on your side. Nail down a smart home-buying BUDGET, but not buy more home than you need. Make your MONEY work harder with the perfect loan for your financial situation. SHOP only homes that fit your budget and lifestyle. NEGOTIATE counteroffers like a riverboat gambler to get the best contract. Avoid costly last-minute CLOSING mistakes that can kill your deal. In a nutshell: SMART ESSENTIALS makes you money buying the home of your dreams for the best price, saves you time buying the right home to fit your needs and keeps resale in mind, plus shows you how to avoid common mistakes that can cost you serious money. About The Series If you want to get smarter for less, then SMART ESSENTIAL guides are all you need. SMART ESSENTIALS readers appreciate the smart, useful, distilled information that goes straight to the point. Certainly, you can swim through the tides of endless online articles searching for useful information. Yes, you can slog through full-length how-to books trying to glean the one chapter you really need hidden in the general filler. But SMART ESSENTIALS readers are too smart for that. You want the information now. You want it smartly presented. You want it current for today's market. Mostly you want your information short, concentrated and applicable to your situation - you want SMART ESSENTIALS. About The Editor Dan Gooder Richard is the editor of the SMART ESSENTIALS series. Dan's first book, REAL ESTATE RAINMAKER(R): Successful Strategies for Real Estate Marketing, was published by John Wiley & Sons in 2000. Dan's second book, REAL ESTATE RAINMAKER(R): Guide to Online Marketing, was published by John Wiley & Sons in 2004. As a publisher, author, speaker and one of the real estate industry's leading authorities in marketing and lead management since 1979, Dan is also creator of the RAINMAKER LEAD SYSTEM(R) now in use by thousands of real estate professionals nationwide.