Conduct the search

Step 1 – Be prepared: Create a renter’s resume with your current and previous five addresses and landlord phone numbers, your employer and length of employment, your current salary and other income, personal references, among other information. Include a copy of your credit report (see How to Shop for a Mortgage, Step 5). You want to look as good on paper as possible to stand out from other applicants.

Step 2 – Look in the newspaper classifieds, apartment hunter publications, college campus bulletin boards, and online for available units to investigate. Ask friends about openings in their buildings.

Step 3 – Consider how much you can afford to pay. A good rule of thumb is no more than 30 percent of your take-home monthly income.

Step 4 – Enlist a rental agent to narrow your search. Depending on the market, this service may be free (paid for by landlords) or cost you a percentage of your rent when you land the apartment.

Step 5 – Turn to a roommate service if you’re looking for cheaper space to share. Be clear what qualities you desire in a roommate, as well as types of people or habits you’d prefer to avoid, such as smokers.

Case the joint

Step 1 – Inspect the property carefully. If there’s any damage, you not only want to ask that it be fixed, but don’t want to be blamed for it later. Make sure such problem areas are addressed in a lease, either by your agreeing to live with it, or the landlord agreeing to fix it by a certain date.

Step 2 – Check out common walls (walls shared with adjoining apartments). The more walls in common, the greater the chance of noise from next door. Also consider a common entrance in terms of how much privacy you may want.

Step 3 – Ask about amenities such as enclosed parking or a garage, a yard, storage, laundry facilities, pool, tennis, gym or concierge services.

Negotiate the deal

Step 1 – If you find an apartment you love but is a stretch financially, ask if there are responsibilities you can take on to lower your rent, such as cutting the lawn, sweeping common areas or taking deliveries. Or if you find a great apartment but it lacks services such as utilities, laundry facilities, cable TV and Internet access, ask the landlord to throw some in at no charge. Many newer buildings will. Or offer to sign a longer-term lease or give a higher security deposit in exchange for more services.

Step 2 – Examine your lease in detail: How much notice is required prior to moving, how large a deposit you have to make, how much cleaning is required upon leaving to get your deposit back, and other provisions. Some agreements require first and last months’ rent plus a security deposit–a significant chunk of change. Is the lease month to month, or a 6- or 12-month period?

Step 3 – Find out what kinds of cosmetic changes you can make, such as painting walls, or structural changes, such as adding shelving.

Step 4 – Ask for a lease with an option to buy if you’d be interested in purchasing the property down the line.

Source: ehow.com

So if you’re looking for ways to accelerate your retirement, here’s how you can move the date of your retirement party up a few years:

1. Add cash.
Yes, it takes money to make money. So the first step in starting and growing your retirement nest egg is finding ways to get more cash into your retirement accounts.

When times are tight, saving more can be a tall order. But you may get some help. If your employer offers a matching contribution to your 401(k) plan, you might double those extra savings. Similarly, Uncle Sam offers benefits in the form of deductions for contributions to 401(k) plans and traditional IRAs, as well as tax credits for low- and middle-income taxpayers who contribute to IRAs.

It takes a little more than $550 per month in savings, earning a 7% return, to get to $1 million over the course of a 35-year career. But if you can add just $100 per month to that — including what your employer puts in and your tax savings — you can cut more than two years off your wait.

2. Embrace stocks.
Saving more is great, but there’s only so much you’ll be able to put aside. You have to make the most of what you have.

People are often too conservative in their retirement investments. Despite the sometimes violent ups and downs of the stock market, the long-term return on stocks far exceeds that of less risky investments like bonds and bank savings accounts. If you have all your money in cash, you won’t lose a penny — but you’re lucky to make 1%-2% right now. Even target funds and other balanced retirement options have sizable portions of their assets in bonds.

A 7% return is a reasonable average for a portfolio that has slightly more in bonds than in stocks. But throughout most of your career, you can afford to take more risk. Owning more stock could raise that return to 9%, lopping off almost five more years from your target.

3. Hit for the fences.
If you only want to match the S&P 500, buying index funds is easy. To get higher returns, however, you’ll have to find stocks that will outperform the index. Here are some examples from the past 20 years:

Those stocks have done particularly well, especially given how badly stocks have done since 2000. But you don’t have to belt all your picks out of the park to retire sooner. If you can eke out just another couple of percentage points on your average return — boosting it to 11% — then that’ll cut another 3 1/2 years off your target.

4. Become a cheapskate.
So far, we’ve only looked at half of the story. How much you spend plays just as important a role in retirement as how much you save. And while many expenses go away when you stop working, new ones quickly take their place — things like travel, entertainment, hobbies, and medical care.

But you have a lot of control over many of these expenses. If it’s worth it to you to spend less in retirement, you won’t have to save as much before you retire. Cutting 10% off your spending means you’ll get to your smaller goal a year earlier.

All in all, combining these four simple tips can let you retire as much as a decade or more sooner than you otherwise would. That thought just might be enough to make even a bad day at work seem brighter.

Source: Fool.com

One way to jump-start your investing is to avoid the procrastination to which many investors fall victim. Especially with long-term goals like retirement, it’s tempting to let saving slide when times are tough. But if you make an effort to catch up on your retirement saving now, the dividends it’ll pay over time will be enormous.

Don’t wait for deadlines
Waiting until the last possible moment to contribute to a retirement account is obviously better than never contributing at all. So if you haven’t had a chance to make a contribution for 2008 yet, knowing that you have until mid-April to find money that’ll qualify for the previous year and open an IRA or make a deposit to an existing account can make you feel more confident that you’ll get it done.

But ideally, you should think instead about your first opportunity to make a contribution. Today, for instance, is the first day you can make contributions for 2009. By getting your money in quickly, you can enjoy the benefits of tax-deferred growth that much sooner.