2010 Homebuyer Tax Credits: What You Need to Know

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This is a Sponsored Post written by me on behalf of Coldwell Banker. All opinions are 100% mine.

With tax season upon us, it’s important to be aware of the tax credits you can take advantage of, especially if you’re in the market for a new home.

Coldwell Banker — one of the world’s most recognized real estate agencies — has offered up a list of the 2010 Homebuyer Tax Credits you may not know exist.

For example: Did you know first-time homebuyers can receive up to $8,000 in tax credits? The same applies to those who have not owned a home in the last three years.

If you already own a home and have been living in it for 5 of the past 8 years, you’re eligible for up to a $6,500 tax credit.

The future of extensions on these credits isn’t known, so if you’re looking to make a move, it would be wise to do so quickly. Qualified homebuyers must have a written and binding contract by April 30, 2010 (close by June 30, 2010.)

On the topic of income limits — they are now $125,000 for singles, $225,000 for married couples with a $20,000 phase-out of the credit for both.

The first-time tax credit was working, but what housing and our national economy needed was incentive for the move-up buyer. According to The 2009 National Association of Realtors® Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers, the number of first-time home buyers rose to 47 percent of all home sales from 41 percent of transactions in last year!s study, and was the highest on record dating back to 1981. The previous high was 44 percent in 1991.

–ColdwellBanker.com

All of this important information and more is summarized in the video below courtesy of Coldwell Banker.

Sunday Chatter – 3/7

What is PubSubHubbub?

PubSubHubbub. Try saying that three times fast. It’s a new plugin for WordPress that allows for push notifications to RSS feeds and search engines. How it works is whenever you publish something new to your blog, Google and RSS readers are notified instantly. The old fashioned way would be to wait for them to come looking for your new content to crawl. That could sometimes take hours, or days, if your site is new. With PubSubHubbub, you simply activate a small plugin and that’s it. No configuration to worry about — just install and activate. It’s available for WordPress.org (as a plugin) and WordPress.com users automatically. I installed it on all five of my sites and have noticed quite the difference in how fast my content gets picked up. Download it here.

YouTube Introduces Video Captioning

To make things easier for some users, YouTube rolled out closed captioning for videos this week. What it does is take any English-language video and puts subtitles at the bottom of the screen when you click the little “CC” button. It’s still in its beta stages, which became clearly obvious when I tried it out and found some weirdly formed sentences get churned out. It definitely needs some work, but for the hearing impaired, this is an excellent addition. It also supports foreign languages and can translate them to English text, but that option is only available on a select number of videos so far.

The Moment Apple Fans Have Been Waiting For

Apple finally announced the launch date of the iPad — April 3 in the U.S. and late April in Canada and other international countries. “Beginning a week from today, on March 12, US customers can pre-order both Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi + 3G,” Apple said. With April 3 being a Saturday, you bet on long lines outside malls everywhere. While I certainly see the potential and use for the product, I won’t be in those lineups.

Google Adds Translation and Privacy Features to Chrome

Google is working its magic this week updating their Chrome browser by adding some new features and enhancing privacy. One of the new things you can do is automatically translate websites to your preferred language if they happen to be written in anything other than English, and vice versa depending on what you speak. If you happen to visit a site based in China, for example, a prompt will come up asking if you wish to translate the page.

Because many of my readers tend to be outside North America, this should come in handy for many of them who visit the blog.

Google also rolled out enhanced privacy options to secure your browsing habits. Similar to what Firefox has already let you do, Chrome now allows you to manage cookies, plug-ins, pop-ups, etc.

Hopefully these new additions don’t slow things down too much. That’s one of the reasons I use Chrome when performing multiple tasks online — the speed. I’m still a big supporter of Firefox, but it can lag every now and then when you have many tabs open. Generally, I have no fewer than 10 tabs open at once during a normal work day.

More on Google’s additions are available on their blog.

The Two Most Influential Sounds in Advertising

The power of sound has a huge influence on how you can get people to buy your product. Whether you’re marketing online, or on television in a commercial, using sound can have the power to encourage customers to listen to what you have to say and make a buy. This rings true for online video if you use it on your sales pages. According to TIME Magazine, the most influential sound you can use in an advertisement is a baby laughing. Second? That would be liquid pouring into a glass/cup, etc.

Find out why below:

I’ll be honest, I would have never guessed these two sounds would have an effect on potential customers. Funny how they mention in the video about trademarking those sounds. Imagine the goldmine you’d have if you could nail down those two distinct sounds and use them to your advantage? It just proves how suggestive the power of sound can truly be as opposed to traditional text.

I’m sure there’s more of psychology behind it, but I’ll leave that to the professionals.

Sunday Chatter – 2/28

YouTube Dropping Support for IE6

If you’re one of the ancient Internet Explorer users, YouTube will no longer support your browser choice next month. A message appearing on the site for some users reads, “Support stops on March 13th. Stopped support essentially means that some future features on YouTube will be rolled out that won’t work in older browsers.” The message then suggests users upgrade to either Safari, Chrome, Firefox, Opera or the latest version of IE. With the recent list of security vulnerabilities for IE, it’s surprising that anyone still chooses to use it as their primary browser. Unfortunately, many offices and schools haven’t made the switch over to something else yet.

How to Optimize a Single Blog Post for SEO

Many bloggers don’t realize the importance of search engine optimization (SEO) for their websites. They have this notion that Google will find their site eventually and start delivering thousands of hits to it. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way and you need to put some effort into it. There’s a great post at ProBlogger this week which shows you the steps on how to optimize each blog post you publish from now on. If you haven’t been doing these steps already, it wouldn’t hurt to go back into your old posts and make some small changes.

Understanding How Chatroulette Works

Chatroulette is the latest sensation which pairs you up with a complete stranger in a video chat. Most of the time you’re “nexted,” which means as soon as you appear on someone’s screen, they click on to the next person because you may not be a female. Chatroulette is all in the name — you never really know what you’re going to get. It’s kind of like going to Vegas, but by sitting in front of your computer… and there’s no money to be won, but you get the idea.

Take a look as this explanation if you don’t quite know about Chatroulette yet.