Mortgage insurance may mean different things to different people – some people may see it as a life insurance policy that clears any outstanding mortgage debt in the event of your death, while others may think that is relates to protecting your mortgage repayments in the event that you lose your income.

Realistically, I probably won’t be building or ordering my first house online. However, I can definitely see building my own home as a second home purchase option; once I get the hang of buying a first home and home ownership, I’ll feel much more confident in building my own house the next time around.

The modern expansion of consumer choice, largely due to our globalized economy which allows the overseas manufacturing of cheaper goods of all sorts, has had two seemingly contradictory effects: while making new goods a lot more affordable and easily replaceable for many people, it has created a much larger market for second-hand products.

So far, 2013 has been a year of good fortune for me so far (knock on wood, right?) I’ve had a couple of unexpected jobs pop up that have allowed me to pay down some of the credit card debt I racked up last year and I’m really close to a salary increase of monumental proportions (I’ll have more information on that in the next 3 weeks).

As circumstances in my life are leading me in the direction of staying put for a while, I’m beginning to think we need to purchase a house sooner than later. Yet, the budding question is where? Ideally, it would be within bicycling distance of where I’ll be spending most of my time which would put us within a radius of 5 miles