Well, there are a few financing tasks that you will do if you purchase a home.  Below are the three most common tasks:

1. Mortgage Loan

   This one should be considered the most obvious one.  Mortgage loans are the loans you get to buy your house.  Usually you have 20+ years to pay the loan back and usually you go back every five years or so to renew the term on your mortgage.

2. Home Refinance

   If you bought your home in Canada in the early 1980s, you may be familiar with this.  You see in the early 80s, the interest rates on mortgages soared.  It wasn’t until the early 1990s where interest rates stabilized and most did a home refinance to take advantage of the cheaper mortgage rates.  Basically you just renew the term on your mortgage here – if it is before it is up, typically you will pay a penalty, but in the case of saving  a large amount of interest – it may be worth it.

3. Home Equity Loans

   If you have had a hankering to renovate your home, or perhaps add a garage, chances are you have gotten a home equity loan to do it.  A home equity loan lets you effectively take out a second mortgage on your home based on the amount of equity you have in your home.  Also, a lot of people use home equity loans to take money out of their home, tax free, in the case the market has gone up.

Today, I just wanted to talk about some of my uses for the Internet – it may be a little different for you, or it may give you some ideas of what would be useful for you.

I use the Internet everyday as a social tool.  I keep in touch with my friends, participate in discussions, and chat with friends.  I also spend this time checking and sending email to others too.

If I need something, I look online first.  Can’t remember a phone number?  Need to find a recipe for cabbage rolls?  These are some of the questions I can answer by taking a look online.  Sometimes to find the answer I use a search engine.  Sometimes, I have a specific site that I use to find the answers.  It really depends for me what I am looking for.

I keep track of my finances online as well.  Some examples would be my retirement portfolio, looking at the stocks I own, checking my bank balance and paying bills.  Also, when I am in the market for new financial products, or looking to see if what I have is the best I use the Internet too.  I can compare bank accounts from different institutions, find the best credit cards, and see the returns on many mutual funds side by side.  It is a great tool as I can make my decision from home without having to go out, or make an appointment (I am very busy).

Lastly, there is one other thing I tend to do online: look at car insurance.  I would like to think that I have cheap car insurance, but since there is such competition in this arena, usually I can get a better deal each year.  I like the fact that most insurance companies now display their competitor’s rates on their site, so that I can make my decision easily.   Sure, I still check out a few different sites to compare their numbers, but it certainly helps out my finances when I pay less and less each year.

So, that is about it for today.  I didn’t touch on some of the other common uses for the Internet such as shopping and auctions, but I figure most people would be familiar with that.  Later on, I may publish more information on other out of the ordinary tasks I use the Internet for, but that will be something for later.

In some respects, it is easy to pick a doctor for an adult.  All you have to do is find a doctor in the yellow pages and usually that is about as hard as it gets.  Most doctors for adults give the same level of primary care compared to one another.

But when it comes to a child, things are a little different.  Sure you can pick a doctor that is a general practitioner, but what if your child has special needs?  A good example would be Asthma.  There may be some special considerations for kids that a general practitioner would not know about, but something a pediatrician would pick up on right away.

Another sign that you should choose a pediatrician is that whenever I take my son into Emergency at the hospital they put him in pediatrics.  You see, even the health care system feels that a pediatrician is a better choice for kids.

When thinking of a doctor for your child weigh your options:  either get a general practitioner that can handle most of the problems that may arise, or get an expert: get a pediatrician.

When I wake up in the morning, I spend some of my time reading the paper.  I learn about what crimes have happened in our city, business news and some of the major headlines from around the world.  Despite the articles being informative, after a while of reading the same stuff, it gets a little boring.

Thinking I might find something better, I sat down at my computer and loaded my favorite search engine.  A quick web search for interesting news headlines came up with a number of results.

Some of the weird news headlines were definitely geared towards you visiting their site.  Some of the topics were family friendly and some were not.  On a few occasions I had to ask my son to leave the room as he was not quite old enough for some of the material.

Later on, when my wife came home from work, I showed her what I had found.  She thought it was pretty cool and proceeded to look on these sites for weird music gossip.  We found some cool stories about Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton.  She swears now that she won’t buy any of those tabloids anymore!

I know now what to do if I want to keep up on events in the world without being bored of my local newspaper: I’ll look online for weird news!

As quite a few of you know, I am fascinated with real estate and property investing.  In the past year one of my favorite international property magazines featured a couple of people that I would consider role models in real estate in South Africa.

Pam Golding is one of the most recognized real estate moguls of South African real estate.  She started from just one sale to now owning the largest independent real estate company in South Africa.

Ian Slot, a formerly a prominent lawyer in South Africa, switched to real estate in 2000.  He is not a real estate agent, but helps provide his agents with an environment geared towards success through his company Seeff Homeloans.