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Are you buying a new house and worrying about what to do with your old home? Clark knows what it's like to have two houses and two mortgages -- it's a burden he once carried for 14 months. But what if there was a way to avoid the double payout headache? Clark recently read a story in Money magazine about a Southern California homebuilder who has started a trade-in program. You can trade your old home in and buy your new house in the same day. There are no real estate commissions on the sale of your home, which is important because they don't pay you market value. Rather, they offer a little more than 90 percent the value of your home. But you get the certainty that you're out from under having to make payments on two houses.

There's no way to gauge if this practice will pop up elsewhere in the country. What we do know is that a lot of homebuilders are desperate right now to unload their product. On a related note, the National Association of Homebuilders reports that there are offers available from a small number of builders that have a long-term guarantee. That means that if you're stuck with your house on the market for too long, the builder of your new home will buy your old one at somewhere below fair market value. The trade-in plan is obviously more to the advantage of the consumer. The downside for the building company either way is that they have to be financially strong enough to carry your home until they can sell it off.

If you really want to annoy someone, call them up on their cell phone with a poll or survey for them to take. Unlike using a landline, people pay for their minutes when they receive incoming calls on the cell phone. So they don't want to talk to pollsters while the meter is running. Pollsters traditionally collect their data by landline, so they're having a real problem in the age of the mobile phone. One in seven people no longer have a home phone, and that number rises to about one in three for households with people up to the age of 30. A San Francisco Chronicle story that Clark read recently made the point that it's going to be very hard to have realistic polling data for the 2008 presidential race because of the popularity of the cell phone.

The unlikely impact that going mobile has had on politics isn't limited to skewing the results for pollsters. Cell phone-only homes are more likely to be Democrat than Republican, with 53 percent of the households identifying themselves as blue voters and 30 percent as red voters. And if in the future, home phones may die out all together, that's when polling will become really difficult. Already traditional call-out research in the radio and TV industries (where people in a given area are called and asked about their favorite artists, songs or shows to help compile playlists) is on the decline. So where is polling research headed? To the internet, of course, thanks to online surveys! There may even come a time when politicians have to go back to making decisions based on their gut, rather than what some survey or research tells them.

A lot of people hope to save money through the years and live on what they've amassed during retirement. In fact, people 65 and older are sitting on $15 trillion in cumulative assets. Sadly, however, many folks fall victim to supposed financial experts who swipe it from them in the golden years. These "experts" get into the lives and wallets of retirees and run off with the money. If you have elderly parents or are facing retirement yourself, don't fall for any of the seminars that offer free lunch or dinner along with complimentary advice on retirement or investing. These seminars are typically hosted by people with alphabet soup titles by their names that sound impressive. The New York Times ran an article that included some of these titles, such as certified elder planning specialist, registered financial gerontologist, certified retirement financial advisor and certified senior advisor. These are bogus credentials that can be obtained when you have some dough to pay for them. But it's hard to tell between the fake certifications and the real ones.

So Clark advises people against buying any investments or insurance from someone receiving a commission to sell to you. He's not opposed to commissioned sales people in general, but they definitely raise a red flag in the investment world. You should instead hire someone to advise you on investments on a fee-only basis, much like you would hire an accountant or a doctor for their learned opinion. As Clark says, there is no free lunch in investing. When somebody says they're going to give you free advice, they're picking both your pockets. The annuities market, where sales are up 30 percent in the last six years, is an area that is central to rip-offs.

Home builders across the country have taken a big hit, according to some brand new statistics. D.R. Horton -- one of the nation's largest home builders -- has reported order cancellations approaching 40 percent and price cuts that are significant on buying new homes. It is completely a buyer's market in the new home market. By comparison, the used-home market is much healthier. Yet sellers have a very pessimistic mindset, thinking they won't be able to sell their home anytime soon. That belief is not entirely unfounded; a house will now sit on the market for an average of nine months before it's sold. So if you want to sell soon, you'll probably have to take less money for your property than you thought. That's the reality of the market. Recovery is on the way, but it's not forecasted to arrive until 2009 or 2010. At that point, we should see what's called equilibrium, where you have roughly equal numbers of willing buyers and anxious sellers. Right now we have more anxious sellers than willing buyers. It's going to take time to unwind the speculative fever that drove prices up unnaturally in a lot of bubble markets, such as California, Arizona, Nevada, Florida and Boston. So if you are a buyer, it's a pretty good time for you even though interest rates have gone up.