You may be hearing a lot about buying properties "short," like it's some modern-day Gold Rush, where homes are being offered for 50% off or more. Short-selling is when the bank agrees the home is worth less than what it was financed for.

Having bid on a bank-owned property in the past year, I can tell you that this is not so. Buying properties that are being sold "short" -- in other words, for less than what the owner owes the bank -- can be a frustrating process. But as with anything that involves a lot of effort, it also has the potential to be quite rewarding.

Before you start out, however, better do your homework. Understand exactly what you're getting in to before embarking on this complex and often frustrating mode of transaction.

If you've been trying to sell your house without any luck, you've probably gone everywhere for help.

Perhaps you've read some how to sell your house books, for instance. (For instance, there's The Complete Idiot's Guide to Staging your Home to Sell by Julie Dana and Marcia Layton Turner.)

Or maybe you've called in your real estate agent and begged for his or her insider tips.

Earlier today, I took my four-year-old to her preschool picnic, one that they hold every year after the last day of school and right before the summer begins. And as I stood there, underneath a canopy of blue sky, watching mostly three and four-year-olds dashing about, scampering on playground equipment and burying each other in the sandbox, I began talking to the mother of one of my daughter's classmates.

Not long after we began talking, I learned that she is a home stager.

I find it both exhilarating and a little frightening that I can go through life perfectly happy and then one day discover that there's yet another profession I had no previous knowledge of. I'm just thankful I'm very happy in my chosen profession of freelance writer. I'm sure I'd be crafting a stern letter to my high school guidance counselor right now if I had left the picnic in a funk, thinking that home staging should have been my calling.

Although that would be a little unfair to my guidance counselor, who couldn't know what she didn't know. According to Wikipedia, home staging didn't really come into its own as a profession until the 1990s, when I was well out of high school.

And so in case any of you out there are like me and have no idea what a home stager is, let me enlighten you. They are the professionals who prepare a house for its close up when it's on the real estate market. In other words, if you're going to sell your house, the idea is that you really should have a home stager involved first. It's that home stager, even more than a realtor, that can really set the mood for the buyer by decorating the house with a certain "buy me, live here" flair.

Our man Abelicio Padilla has been blogging about his personal financial situation and he has been seeking advice for making sound money decisions. I wrote this piece as my input into his situation. If you'd like more background before you proceed, read Abelicio Padilla's interesting blog posts here.

Now here's my input:

It sounds like you have a plan Abe. However, I'd like you to think a little more about if you really want to sell that house. The market is down right now which means you probably won't get your best selling price for it. Also, did you consider that if you sell the house, you'll lose your mortgage interest deduction when you file your taxes? That deduction loss will cut into the monthly savings you expect to get by selling. Even though you won't notice it month to month, you'll feel it when you file your yearly income taxes. Consider also the upset that moving can cause. It's expensive. It will disrupt operations. In the long run It could cost you more than you think.