For the past year the Federal Reserve’s voracious $1.25-trillion purchase program of mortgage-backed securities has effectively pushed the 30-year conforming fixed-rate mortgage lower than it would normally be. Typically the conforming FRM is about 25 basis points lower than the rate on a jumbo mortgage. According to Bankrate’s latest weekly survey, the difference is more than one percentage point (6.24% vs. 5.19% as of Nov. 10).

But the Federal Reserve has signaled that it intends to wind down its purchase program by the end of the first quarter of 2010. Analyst Meredith Whitney recently dubbed the Fed’s “Great Exit” the biggest risk for banks and the markets over the next four months. And consumers.

Absent another big buyer (or set of buyers) stepping up and taking the Fed’s place, rates would likely rise. If the jumbo/conforming spread reverts to its historic norm, we’re looking at a 30-year fixed rate mortgage closer to 6% based on today’s levels. That could translate into a decline of 10% or so in home buyers’ purchasing power. A $300,000 mortgage at 5.02%, for example, works out to about $1,614 a month. At 6% you’d need to drop the mortgage amount to less than $270,000 to keep the monthly payment at $1,614. As Amanda Gengler points out in her 2010 Housing Outlook, prospective buyers and refinancers should look to lock in a rate sooner rather than later.

The tax credit boosted markets by giving first-time buyers a credit of up to $8,000 they could deduct from their income taxes. The credit is fully refundable: Even a buyer who pays less than $8,000 in income tax gets the full amount of the credit back.

The credit was recently extended through the middle of 2010 and expanded to include many existing homeowners. That has the industry buzzing.”The credit is working better than first projected — it now looks like we’ll have 2.3 to 2.4 million first-time buyers this year,” said Lawrence Yun, chief economist for NAR. “With expansion of the tax credit to additional buyers through the middle of next year, and no major unforeseen events impacting the economy, home prices should rise between 3% and 5% in 2010.”

NAR forecasts that existing-home sales will total slightly over 5 million in 2009, a 2% increase compared with 2008. Next year, they predict a gain of 13.6% to 5.69 million units. That should draw down inventory and prop up home prices, according to Yun, but, he cautioned: “Risks, such as unemployment, remain.”

Critics of the tax credit call it a poorly targeted method of boosting sales. The credit added, by nearly the most positive evaluations — including NAR’s — fewer than 400,000 sales to the total this year, about 20% of all first-time purchases. Since all first-timers get the credit, whether it persuaded them to buy or not, that would mean about $40,000 was spent by the government for every extra sale, critics say.

Indeed, many in the industry trace the improvement in the housing market to much better affordability, rather than the tax credit. Not only have home prices fallen more than 30% from their peak, according to the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price index, but mortgage rates have remained extremely low all year, keeping monthly payments low. Most sales have been of existing homes. New home sales, as well as new home construction, have remained mired in the doldrums.

NAR predicts total new home sales will total a mere 397,000 this year, rising to 549,000 in 2010. During the housing boom, new home sales were far higher, more than 1.35 million in 2005, for example. While new home sales are still very low, the inventory of new homes for sale has been dropping. That’s because very few new homes are being built. Existing home inventory has also fallen a bit.

“We’ve seen a steady downtrend in housing inventory for well over a year,” said Yun. Any home price rise will also have a healthy impact on the foreclosure plague. Falling prices are a major contributing factor driving foreclosures. As home values fall, homeowners are less able and less likely to continue to make monthly payments.

Now that most of us are connected to a vast, invisible external brain brimming with solutions to our burning questions, Mencken’s early-20th-century rule needs revising. In the 21st century, I believe, few entrepreneurs will go broke overestimating the American public’s desire for intelligence.

Case in point: A crop of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs have launched mainstream, profit-generating Web sites devoted to — wait for it — wine collecting. In Mencken’s day good wine was the province of a tiny, well-educated urban elite. But in 2008, per capita wine consumption in the U.S. surpassed that of beer for the first time. You can now find pretty decent vintages at Costco (COST, Fortune 500).

The more you imbibe, the more curious you’re going to become about the differences between Californian and French, Chilean and Argentinean, cabernet and pinot, 2007 and 1997. And you’re increasingly likely to find answers to your questions online.

“People are much more educated about the basics now compared with four years ago, when I started the company,” says Alyssa Rapp, 30, CEO of the Palo Alto-based wine connoisseurship site Bottlenotes.com. “If you’re young and it’s cheap to get wine from around the world, you’re going to experiment,” she says. The under-40 crowd accounts for 80% of Rapp’s registered users.

Bottlenotes is like the Match.com or the Netflix (NFLX) of the wine business. It asks you a few questions about your tastes and builds a profile of your palate. For around $60 a month, the site will then send you bottles that your mouth will probably thank you for. It’s the perfect resource for inexperienced oenophiles who want to make their own journey into wine without a snobby sommelier at their elbow.

Sure, Rapp’s wine club business has been whacked by the recession. But she also created an e-mail newsletter called The Daily Sip. So many customers signed up for the newsletter that Bottlenotes now gets the majority of its revenue from selling advertising on the Sip — enough to support the company’s eight employees and attract a first round of venture funding. (It also helps that Rapp doesn’t keep any wine in inventory.)

Meanwhile Vinfolio.com, founded in 2003, is rapidly becoming the eBay (EBAY, Fortune 500) of wine, providing a marketplace for collectors to sell off their stock. More than 100,000 collectors have registered 12 million bottles, worth a whopping $2 billion, with the site, which takes a 15% commission from every sale. Vinfolio also offers a free iPhone app that tells you the average price of any varietal you might see in the store.

And then there’s Gary Vaynerchuk, one of the most kinetic figures in the Web 2.0 ecosystem. Vaynerchuk, 33, doesn’t own a company, but his near-daily tasting videos at WineLibrary.com have become a cult hit in the past three years. The fact that the New Jersey-born Vaynerchuk looks and sounds as if he belongs in The Sopranos tells you a lot about the evolving American class system.

I’m not saying you should enter the online wine business. Its state-by-state regulatory patchwork, a hangover from Prohibition, is enough to give anyone a headache and has held Amazon.com (AMZN, Fortune 500) back from entering the space.

I am saying that consumers are getting smarter (literally — average IQ is rising by three points every decade, according to numerous peer-reviewed studies). And entrepreneurs in many markets are finding clever, interactive ways to educate their customers online. As Rapp likes to say: “I’m not dumbing down. I’m smarting up.”

When I think of home decorating tips, I’m not talking about what type of flooring you have or what your countertops look like. I’m talking about items you have on your countertops or the curtains on your windows. Window coverings can change the whole look of a room and you can find inexpensive fabric today that you don’t even have to hem if you don’t want to, that you just drape over a rod. There are many home decorating tips for the window draping, but you can use your imagination on how to wrap it on the rod. You can wrap it around the rod at the ends and let it hang all the way across or you can wrap it around the rod in the middle too. You can go to your local dollar store and get many home decorating tips that will cost you pennies. I found some tassels that looked great hanging down from a window treatment that was literally a dollar apiece.

One of the first home decorating tips I believe that can change the whole look of a room is color. Instead of having white walls, try painting the walls light beige, tan, or cream color. These are pretty elegant colors that will go with about any colors. You can also opt for a more pronounced color as well. You can go to any local hardware or building supply store and look at a variety of paint samples. Take home some of the sample choices they offer for your home decorating tips idea. You can then place them up on the wall for a better idea of what they might look like. This can be very helpful in deciding which color to go with. These home decorating tips can be a lot of fun so, include the whole family in the decision making.

There are so many home decorating tips to give, but pillows can make a huge difference in the way your couch or bedroom looks. You don’t have to purchase expensive pillows, just look around for good deals. You can mix and match your pillows for great results. Many home decorating tips will tell you that the pillows don’t all have to be the same size or shape either, but the colors do need to go together and match up to the couch that you have. You can choose solid colors and stripes or flowers for your pillow choices, but the placement of the pillows is important. Home decorating tips can be helpful for ideas, but you will ultimately have to make the choices. Just move things around differently and stand back and examine what you are looking at. If you don’t like it, continue to change it until you do. There are many books and magazines on home decorating tips that can be useful.