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.