If you want to hit up a local REIA for recommendations the NEREIA in Chelmsford is this Wed. 

My wife and I are looking to invest in something for our kids, hopefully something that can fund their college or will make a nice wedding present.  

-----It is called paying for a wedding-lol.

We also have a monthly BP meetup, just had our January one Wed night.Any questions or such feel free to ask.Dave

As I sat down last weekend and reviewed the plan and did my monthly finances I started to ponder the risk of my variable interest rate student loans, my upcoming wedding (August) and my real estate goals.

DO NOT and I mean DO NOT contact those creditors or make partial payments to them.What that will do is REFRESH and old negative account and make the credit score take a nose dive.It is true it takes usually 1 to 2 months to update changed results in the scoring model.If the buyer has a time sensitive loan issue the lender can do what is called a "rapid re-score" with the credit which will update the credit report score much faster but costs money.In addition to paying down the cards your buyer can also request a credit line increase on all the cards.If 3 out of 5 or 2 out of 5 increase the limit that will help bring down available credit percentages to used credit even more.Even though the buyer is at 680 they want to try to get the score up higher.You do not want to be right at where the score requirement is and then something happens and you are off by a few points.Do not close credit lines.One of the scoring criteria is length of active credit history in good standing.If the buyer has 5 cards and 3 are 2 years old and 1 is 1 years old and the last one is 4 years old then you have a 4 years history.If you close out the oldest one your credit history in good standing has dropped to 2 years now which affects the scoring model.The buyer should stay away from big purchases cars,furniture,appliances,vacations,weddings,etc. until AFTER they have closed on a house and moved in.Those types of purchases are much more lenient on debt ratios than house loans these days.

No class this week, but starts back up on Wed March 29th. 

a little bit about myself:- Graduated from Duquesne University (class of 98 - business major) - working full time in IT field- working part time as wedding photographer - married to my beautiful wife, blessed with a 3 y.o son.a couple quick questions to start with:1.

We're also not wedded to one market right now.

I own a STR 1 block away which Nets $2k a month for the past 2 years with 88% booking rate and often people reach out trying to book weekends and weeks that are not available so I know the area can support more, plus we have a big wedding hall 1 block away so we plan to capitalize on that.