The Jacksonville home, located at 6120 San Jose Boulevard West, has 14,000 square feet with six bedrooms, six full baths and two full baths. The home also has a spacious formal dining room, wet bar with wine cellar, media den, gourmet kitchen, butler’s pantry, library, game room, sauna, steam bath, exercise room and a lanai pool. Attached to this tree-lined river front home is a one bedroom cottage.  The home was originally listed for $10 million and can be sold prior to the auction date for a price of $5.5 million.

The St. Augustine home, located at 642 Santa Teresa Court, has over 5,000 square feet of indoor living and over 1,000 square feet of outdoor living. This custom home includes five bedrooms, six baths, two-story foyer, living and dining rooms, den/library, game room with bar, gathering room with entertainment center, three-car garage and an outside lanai pool area. This home is in the master-planned Palencia community which has a 40-acre Village Center, 33,000 square foot clubhouse, championship golf course and parks, trails and open areas. This home was originally listed for $3 million and can be bought prior to auction for $1.87 million.

Both of these homes will be auctioned off on May 24. Interested buyers can preview the Jacksonville home by appointment. The St. Augustine home is open Saturday and Sundays from 1-4 p.m. and by appointment during the week. For more information on these properties, visit AuctionJacksonville.com.

One of the biggest issues that will affect the upcoming real estate hot season is the instability of Freddie Mac, one of the secondary mortgage market giants. While Freddie reaped $1.5 billion dollars in the last quarter of 2011, that’s still short of the $1.7 billion loan that is due to the Treasury. This is all part of Freddie’s woes of borrowing a total of $72.3 billion from the treasury and only repaying $16.5 billion so far. These stresses mean that Freddie won’t be able to help the mortgage industry recover as swiftly, which will make getting loans harder for those who may normally try to get loans which would be backed or purchased by Freddie Mac. Overall, mortgage applications are down more than two percent month over month while refinance applications are down around three percent, which isn’t promising for the prospect of spring borrowing.

For more information about real estate, including when you should buy and what help underwater homeowners can be looking forward to, see the full article. For more additional information about real estate, tax, credit, retirement and other effective ways for saving money, explore the Equifax Finance Blog.

While identity thieves target adults for well-established credit lines and scores, children are just as valuable for their clean slates. These provide a canvas for building a new profile from scratch that can be used for financial fraud, organized crime and false IDs for illegal immigrants. This clean slate is also used by many to avoid their own poor FICO score for the purposes of getting credit cards and loans.

To protect your family, it’s best to educate your child about the dangers and be as careful about their information as you are with your own. Talking with your child early about the dangers of giving information online or to strangers will set them on a positive path for the rest of their lives. Controlling their information and having a healthy dose of paranoia will also go a long way towards keeping them safe.

For more helpful information about protecting yourself and your family from identity theft as well as all manner of helpful articles about credit, taxes, real estate, retirement and more, explore the Equifax Finance Blog.

The first way you can avoid new fees is to switch banks, or swap from a bank to a credit union, community bank or online bank. Different institutions have different rules, and its pays to shop around as you can find free checking and other bonuses out there.

If you want to stay with your current bank, you should carefully review the new policies. In some cases, you can change your buying habits to avoid fees. Depending on how your bank works, direct deposit may save you from monthly fees. If you have multiple accounts, you can link them in order to avoid the newer balance requirements. Finally, keep track of your account balances to avert overdraft fees.

For additional information, including the full article with expanded information about the new fees and news that you can use about personal insurance matters, taxes, retirement and more, be sure to see the Equifax Personal Finance Blog.

What you won’t find in the metro-Atlanta area are opportunities for snow skiing. What you will find is that snowfall is only experienced once or twice per season (usually less than two or three inches) with rare occurrences of ice storms (winter temperatures on average remain above freezing). The average annual temperature is 61 degrees, with July being the hottest month averaging 89 degrees and January being the coldest month averaging 33 degrees.

What does that mean for metro-Atlanta residents? Well, you can play golf or tennis, bike or run, garden, attend outdoor festivals and enjoy the area’s natural resources such as the Chattahoochee River and Stone Mountain all year long.

Many of the new home communities offered by Traton are located near parks and preserves that allow residents to enjoy the wonderful Atlanta weather all year long. The builder has new homes throughout the north and northwest suburbs of downtown Atlanta with prices starting from the $180,000s.

Visit http://www.TratonHomes.com for more information about this builder’s communities and homes.

It’s easier now more than ever to take direct control over cutting down your paper storage. You can ditch time and space consuming physical filing operations by investing in a scanner or an all-in-one scanner-printer-fax-copy machine for your home office, which can also be a tax deduction as a business expense. Now is a great time to shop for one, as most consumer electronics are on sale as manufacturers get ready to roll out 2012 models.  Check sites like Consumer Reports and CNet to find out which model is best for you, and know that there are wireless solutions that can reduce the number of cords and cables in your office.

Now, once you’ve got stuff scanned, there’s the question of how to keep your digital copies. Having them all on one hard-drive is a big no no, as there are all manner of internal and external opportunities for them to be deleted. If you’re old-fashioned, buy an external hard drive and manually transfer everything over and keep that drive somewhere separate from your primary computer – your office, your car, anywhere that is safe and away from your primary data set so you don’t lose both in the event of a fire, flood or some other natural disaster.

The article has a number of other tips and tricks for conquering your paperwork, including hiring other services to do the dirty work and some benefits of putting your data on the cloud.  Be sure to check the Equifax Finance Blog for more information about keeping your taxes, credit, insurance, real estate and retirement under control.

If you’re donating a lot of stuff, say $500 or more, you must provide a detailed list of what was donated, how many units, what it cost originally and its value when making the donation. It’s a great idea to take a snapshot of them for proof of condition with your phone or digital camera for records. There are many sites online which can help you determine the value at time of donation.

If your donations exceed $5,000, you’re going to need a written appraisal from a professional to be able to claim deductions. This may mean that you should hold onto your donations until you can make one big one that can be properly appraised to keep your deductions safe and make sure you pay the right amount. Or you may want to wait and plan out your big donations so you’re not stuck at the end of the year with a total at or near $5,000 and no way to appraise already donated items.

For more information about properly documenting your deductions and all kinds of other tax expertise, be sure to check the Equifax Finance Blog, especially as the year ends so you can be sure to make all of your i’s are dotted and t’s are crossed before the end of the calendar year.

Despite the encouraging increase in the Housing Market Index (HMI), overall measure continues to remain quite low. High numbers of foreclosures, financing difficulties, inaccurate appraisals, and restrictive lending are all key factors in the discouragement of potential buyers.

According to the NAHB’s Chief Economist, David Crowe, this second consecutive gain indicates that well-qualified buyers from similar areas have been “tempted” by favorable mortgage rates and pricing to seek a new home. Gradual gains can be expected as conditions continue to improve.

Three out of four regions saw an increase in November. The Northeast increased by 6 points, the Midwest by eight, and the South by two points. After a large increase in October, the West returned to trend with a six point decline. It now rests at fifteen.

Overall poor housing market conditions are beginning to improve. With a slow yet steady increase in the HMI, buyers and builders alike can see a bright future ahead. Although it may take a significant amount of time to enter into ideal levels of confidence, good things come to those who wait.

In her recent article for the Equifax Finance Blog, “Homeowners Insurance: Someone Gets Hurt On Your Property” Linda Rey offers homeowners advice for dealing with injuries on their property.

The first thing that needs to be assessed is the extent of the injuries. Are they serious enough to warrant a 911 call?

After that, depending on your relationship with the injured party, the police may need to be called so both parties can make statements.

Next, be sure and take photos of the situation. Try and photograph any injuries and the area of your property where the injury occurred.

Depending on how the injured party wants to handle the situation, more work may be required on our part. If the injured party is merely looking for reimbursement of medical costs, this could be a best case scenario. Of course, if the person is looking to sue you or claim damages beyond what your insurance policy covers, the aforementioned steps become even more important.

Either way, be sure and call your insurance agent as soon as possible for more guidance on how to handle a situation. The sooner you bring in an agent, the sooner he or she can assess the situation and offer advice.

For more insurance advice, visit the Equifax Finance Blog.

A recent post on the Equifax Finance Blog offers some tax tips for deducting business mileage. Tax specialist Eva Rosenberg’s article, “2012 Standard Mileage Rate: How It Affects Your Business Vehicle,” has the following advice.

If you use your car for business or work, you probably already know that you can use either the standard mileage deduction or you may use actual expenses. Using actual expenses allows you to claim depreciation deductions, in addition to the registration fees, repairs, insurance and fuel costs. Aside from the standard mileage rate increase, the rate for moving and medical mileage has also increased to 23.5 cents per mile from 19 cents. Charitable mileage stays the same, at 14 cents.

One thing that people may not realize is that the standard mileage rate has deduction built into it. Rosenberg points out that when you sell your car, you must take depreciation into account. She suggests using the table on the Small Business Taxes & Management site to determine how much depreciation you used each year. This number will be be based on the total number of business miles you reported on your tax returns.

Read Rosenberg’s full article on the Equifax Finance Blog.