Dale Marciniak's Blog

  So, the New Year is right around the corner…. What is on your list of must do’s for 2014? Are you planning on doing some home remodeling in the New Year?  Or is building a new home on your mind? Well designers are offering up their thoughts and ideas of what will be “hot” in the year 2014.    A...

  It is smart to know what your credit score is so that one can understand what potential creditors are looking at.  You can obtain a copy each year of your credit report from each of three major credit reporting agencies (Experian, Equifax and TransUnion).  Review your report carefully so that i...

 Now that the weather is turning colder, wouldn’t it be nice to head home and cozy up to the warmth of a fireplace? Some of us are fortunate to have a fireplace, but other homes do not have this feature. In fact, according to an article in House Logic, about half of the 40 million homes construc...

  So the guest list is set, the turkey is thawing in the refrigerator and all the other items are stock piled on the counter, ready for you to assemble the Thanksgiving feast. But have you ever thought how much energy is being used preparing the food and entertaining your guests? Here are a few s...

  Just looking over a few articles in “Keeping Current Matters” and I came across an article that talked about selling your home now,  as opposed to waiting till Spring. Many of us think that when selling a home, we should wait until spring, when the weather is warmer and there isn’t snow on the ...

Last month, the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA), the National Association of Realtors, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac all projected that mortgage interest rates are projected to increase by about one full percentage point over the next twelve months. We also know that home prices are expected to i...

Today’s  buyers want a move-in ready home and they are willing to pay more for one that they can just move into without doing any work!  Sellers may increase their sale price and decrease the time it takes to sell by just doing a few key home improvement projects.  Which ones?  Carefully consider...

  We’ve all seen solar panels on top of buildings in and around different areas of the country, but how many homeowners actually put them on their roofs? Driving past a neighborhood near my home, there was a ranch home being built, and it was quite surprising to me, to see that they had solar pan...

Just read an article posted at www.nerdwallet.com re: The Best Towns in Wisconsin for Families. It talked about the top 10 cities in WI for young families.  Only places with a population greater than 15,000 were considered.  Some of the main questions when evaluating this were the academic perfor...

Just read the morning paper and saw that FoodShare benefits are being cut.  Milwaukee alone will witness a loss of over 3 million dollars each month and this cut will increase dependency on charity for one of the most basic things in life: food.  In September, more than 34,000 people visited Milw...