First Time Home Buyer. Home Buying For Dummies, 3rd edition

First Time Home Buyer Though fun and exciting, buying a home can also be complicated and confusing—and most people learn the hard way that a wrong move can cost dearly. In order to find the perfect home at the best price, you must have skill, foresight, and a little guidance from experienced professionals.
Home Buying for Dummies, Third Edition provides just that! Packed with invaluable advice in an objective, down-to-earth style that will have you sitting in your dream home in no time, this friendly guide contains everything you need to know to play the home buying game. It has the tools you need to:

    * Improve your credit score and select a mortgage
    * Choose a time and place to buy
    * Determine the price you want to pay
    * Assemble an all-star real estate team
    * Make use of the wonderful world of the Internet
    * Negotiate your best deal
    * Inspect and protect your home
    * Handle and become responsible for the title
    * Cope with buyer’s remorse

Featured in this guide are tips and tricks on things you should do after you seal the deal, as well as things you ought to know about real estate investing. Also included is advice on how to sell your house, as well as a sample real estate purchase contract and a good inspection report. Don’t get chewed up by the real estate market—Home Buying for Dummies, Third Edition will lead you to the home you want!

First Time Home Buyer This may be the best comprehensive guide for home buyers. Home Buying for Dummies is coauthored by Eric Tyson, author of several other books in the For Dummies series, and Ray Brown, a long-time real estate professional. Like other books in the series, this one is an easy and even entertaining read. But it does not gloss over details in pursuit of simplicity. Home Buying for Dummies covers all the bases, providing clear explanations and reasonable judgments on how to select a mortgage, hire a real estate agent, find the right house, and negotiate a good deal. The book goes further than most in providing helpful, specific information. For example, in discussing ways to save money for a future down payment, Home Buying for Dummies even includes the phone numbers for various mutual funds appropriate to different investment time frames.

I just successfully bought my first house. I shopped Amazon.com and bought half-a-dozen "how to" books for buying a house before I started my search. I was buying this house on my own, and had no one to rely on for hand-holding or expert advice. I also had a lot of qualms about the whole process. Out of all the books I bought, this was the one I kept going back to. It's typical of a "Dummies" book in that it doesn't give you too much unusable knowledge, but--coversely--it also doesn't drill down to the nth degree on any one topic. This is okay, though. With the usual high-quality editing that goes into most "Dummies" books, this one is very easy to read. It talks about who to hire (e.g., real estate agent, mortgage broker, etc.), how to go about hiring them, how to go about getting a mortgage, what are the ins-and-outs of mortgages, how to get a down-payment together, and--I thought--most importantly; how to budget yourself in preparation for homeownership. This part on figuring out what you spend as a renter and what you think you'll spend as a homeowner helps you decide how much of a house you can afford, and, in my experience, this is one of the big mysteries of buying your first house. Overall, the book is comforting, reliable [now that I'm in a house, I can see that the advice was good], and well organized. If you don't know much about how to buy a house, this is a fine start and a trustworthy source of information.  

This book is amazing. I never considered buying a "for Dummies" series book because I thought they would be overly simplisitic, but this book proved me wrong. The authors do an awesome job of presenting just enough detail on every aspect of buying a home- I kept catching myself having a questions, then reading on to the net chapter and finding the answer. You may be tempted to skip around from chapter to chapter, but I've found that reading this book from the beginning is almost necessary since things like understanding which mortgage to get and how much of a house you want are all dependant on answers you arrive at in early chapters. I've just finished the book and feel well prepared and educated to tackle the house-hunting task now. A definite read. 

I had purchased this book as well as The Idiots Guide for Buying a Home and was pretty impressed with Home Buying for Dummies. It was well organized, very readable and had very useful information that my parents wouldn't have told me. Some notworthy examples of how practical this book was include:
1. consider a tax free money market account to invest your down payment while you save depending on your tax bracket. Names of possible accounts were included.
2. Roth IRAs allow you to borrow against them tax free for the down payment as a first time home buyer.
3. What to consider for watching a housing market....
To name a few.

The Idiots Guide was an absolute waste of money. One of the reviewers here posted that Dummies was patronizing -- First Time Home Buyer the Idiots guide was truely insulting. It actually seemed like a bad rippoff of the Dummies book, not to mention the font was twice as big and double spaced. I would have returned it if my spouse hadn't written in it. If you want it, look in the used books section...

I have to agree with another reviewer that some of the content is covered in other Dummies books like Personal Finances for Dummies -- but having the salient points repeated in the context of home buying was helpful. I dont have the other Dummies books mentioned so for me, the redundency between books was minimal.

Go with the Dummies book. Its an excellent intro to buying a home!