Here's my philosophy: An informed home buyer is a successful homeowner. My goal is to provide you with information and tools you can use to make better buying decisions.

That's what Freddie Mac, a federally chartered mortgage company, says too in a free booklet on home inspections. I have read the booklet from cover to cover and highly recommend it.

For starters, Freddie Mac recognizes that it is simply not practical to have a professional home inspection performed on every house you might want to buy.

At about $200 or more for an inspection, you could use up your down payment before ever getting around to making an offer. So it makes sense to develop your own pre-offer inspection list, and that is what this booklet does. A professional inspection will come later, after any offer you make has been accepted.

The Consumer Inspection Kit explains how to conduct your own inspection with an easy-to-use and step-by-step approach.

The first step, according to the kit, involves talking to the owners of the property. This should help ease concerns over buying from an unknown source.

For example, ask these questions:

"Have you ever had any termite activity here?"

"Does your basement ever get wet or damp?"

Answers to direct questions can help you steer clear of serious problems. The kit also recommends that if you are buying a house occupied by renters, you should interview them, too. Good idea!

The second step listed in the kit: Inspect the home, focusing on the following areas: basement, systems, kitchen, bath and exterior.

It will give you an excellent overview of the condition of the house, and it forces you to do a relatively thorough exam of improvements.

The kit also gives you helpful hints of things to look for in each major area. For example, when inspecting the basement, it recommends that you look for telltale signs of past water penetration such as white efflorescence on block walls or rust marks around the base of the furnace. Such tips make this booklet more valuable than a mere checklist.

The kit also includes a section to help you analyze all the data you have gathered and determine if you are ready to move forward with the house deal.

I have found that most people buy their real estate emotionally, then find a way to justify it logically. Unfortunately, that's not the best way to approach the process. This kit helps put the logical part of the equation back where it belongs, at the beginning of the process.

It's easy to fall in love with a house, make an offer and decide to buy it regardless of flaws that may not be obvious. It's wiser to get an inspection.

As is typical with advice from government-sponsored sources, this one is overly nervous about radon and asbestos, housing threats that largely run their course. This booklet must have been written before we knew about mold and mildew, today's big threats.

The kit by Freddie Mac can be viewed and downloaded in Adobe Acrobat format on my Web site at www.money99.com by clicking on Additional Resources, then clicking Home Inspection.

So what is Freddie Mac? It is a stockholder-owned corporation chartered by Congress in 1970 to keep money flowing to mortgage lenders in support of homeownership and rental housing. Freddie Mac buys single-family and multifamily residential mortgages, which it finances primarily by issuing securities and debt instruments in the capital markets. Creating this "secondary market" helps homeowners get lower housing costs and better access to financing.

Freddie Mac has more educational booklets available for free. Go to www.freddiemac.com and click on Homeownership Resources.

In addition, it provides real estate calculators that can help you decide between mortgages of differing lengths and determine how much cash to put down. They can make real estate math easier to perform.

The site also has free worksheets for home buyers. For example, the Lender Comparison Worksheet helps a borrower compare apples with apples, and that's not always easy when looking at today's mortgages. The House Hunting Worksheet has an excellent form to record your thoughts about each house you visit. The average buyer visits more than 10 homes before making a decision, so this helps keep the details straight.

John Adams is a broker and investor.