Buying a house should be getting easier.

For most people who are looking into buying a house in Tarrant County for the first time, the two greatest obstacles appear to be financial, and—for lack of a better word—emotional.

Let’s deal with the second barrier right off the bat. Emotional may not be an apt adjective because most of the emotions that accompany the process of buying a house are positive. The potential of joining your Tarrant County friends as a homeowner is certainly a positive goal. Accompanying your chosen Tarrant County Realtor^® on house-hunting tours in search of your dream house takes energy—but they are also some of the most interesting shopping trips imaginable. And the pride of ownership that comes with unlocking your own front door for the first time is a truly satisfaction-producing moment.

Stacked up against all those positives is one strong negative for first-time buyers: the instinctive impulse to avoid the unknown. The process of buying a house is full of legal, technical and procedural details that can appear to be all but impenetrable to those who’ve never weathered them before. That makes it understandable why you’d want to put off tackling the whole can of worms—especially since buying a house is such a weighty transaction.

The reason this first barrier is ultimately overcome is probably also why nearly 90% of U.S. residential real estate transactions involve a real estate professional. It doesn’t take long before most future buyers learn that they can enlist the services of a professional like me to act on their behalf…for free! With a Tarrant County Realtor to guide and advise on all aspects of buying a house in Tarrant County, the technicality obstacle disappears. Veteran homeowners don’t give it a second thought.

Which leaves that other barrier: the financial one.

But here, too, buying a house should have gotten somewhat easier. Not because it’s any easier to make money—and not because having enough of the green stuff isn’t still a prerequisite to getting a front door key of your own—but because there are so many readily accessible ways to track and control personal finances. Keeping up with household expenses once meant conscientiously stacking incoming bills and mailing out payments at the end of the month—then having to wait for the bank statement to arrive to verify household balances.

Today all that information can handled online—and any number of personal finance software solutions like Quicken, Microsoft Money, and iCash make it easy to track and schedule just about everything. That means it’s a simple matter to keep on top of all the income and expense flows as their deadlines come and go month-by-month. This doesn’t make any expenses disappear, but it does make it much less likely that due dates will be accidentally overlooked—or that credit score damage will result. It also makes it a whole lot easier to project income and expenses into the future—and to plot a savings trajectory that produces the down payment you need when you need it.

Buying a house in Tarrant County becomes a less daunting Prospect when your financial picture is organized for clarity—and when your house-hunting team includes an agent with wide local experience and personal knowledge of the current Tarrant County offerings. That’s me!