By late spring, homebuying season is in full swing. And right when all the good listings start popping up, so does summer wanderlust — especially if you were cooped up all winter.

House hunting can be exhausting, especially in today’s competitive market. So if you need a vacation, are you throwing away your shot at success?

Karen Wilder, a real estate agent with Mott & Chace Sotheby’s International Realty in Charlestown, Rhode Island, doesn’t think so.

“Sometimes, it can be the best thing for your search for you to just take a little time off,” she says.

If you want to travel and house-hunt at the same time, you have to plan ahead and consider your short- and long-term goals. Here’s how to balance the homebuying process with a much-needed summer getaway.

Weigh your priorities

First, gut-check your travel plans against FOMO: the fear of missing out. In a hot market, home shoppers need to act fast when a great house gets listed. Maybe you have a truly can’t-miss trip — say, your bestie’s destination wedding or a major work conference. But if you have the option to schedule your travel later, it might be worth it to wait.

To help you decide, consider how you’d feel if “the” house came along while you were out of town. Would you regret not being there for an in-person walkthrough? Would you rather be on the beach than on the phone with your buyer’s agent?

“Everybody needs to consider their own comfort level with shopping remotely — their own sort of FOMO when it comes to going away and unplugging,” Wilder says.

The homebuying process is less familiar for first-time home buyers, who might prefer to handle things in person. In her experience, Wilder notes that seasoned real estate buyers or investors are often more comfortable with overseeing a transaction from a distance.

Find a proxy

Krystal Stearns, branch manager at Valor Home Loans in Colorado Springs, Colorado, is one of those seasoned pros. She has purchased six properties across three states without seeing any of them in person first. Digital tools like virtual walk-throughs and listing videos can help, but nothing beats a boots-on-the-ground perspective, she says.

Before you travel, ask an experienced buyer’s agent, trusted friend or family member to attend walk-throughs or open houses on your behalf. When Stearns bought her Florida vacation home sight unseen, she knew she could trust her buyer’s agent to give candid feedback on the place.

“You really need someone who is going to be honest with you, that’s going to look out for you and your family and understand your goals,” she says.

If any must-see listings arise while you’re away, your proxy can walk through the house with you in real time on a video call. They might notice things the listing photos can’t fully capture, from a breathtaking view to a troublesome odor.

“You cannot scratch and sniff online,” Wilder says.

Stay plugged in

Unless you can accommodate a complete pause on your homebuying journey, it’s wise to remain somewhat connected during your travels.

“It might not be the time to climb Mount Everest or, you know, go somewhere completely off the grid,” Wilder says.

Heading on a cruise or long flight? Buy the Wi-Fi. Going camping? Bring a portable power bank to charge your devices (and make sure its battery is full before you leave). Share your travel plans with your buyer’s agent and mortgage team so they know the best way to reach you and how quickly you’re able to respond.

If you’re under contract, your homebuying squad can explain which time-sensitive requests to expect and who will be sending them. For example, if your loan is in underwriting, you might have to submit recent bank statements or pay stubs. Following a home inspection, you’ll want to review the inspection report and negotiate any requests for repairs.

“A closing is, you know, three to four weeks,” Stearns says. “A lot happens in that time period.”

Before you reply to any urgent-sounding emails, check the sender’s address to make sure the request is legit. If something looks off, it could be a mortgage closing scam. Identity criminals can send convincing lookalike emails that attempt to steal your money or personal information.

Watch your spending

A home is one of the biggest purchases you’ll ever make, so now isn’t the time to drain your savings. Before you leave, make a travel budget and stick to it. That’ll save you the stress (or regret) of wondering if you can afford something while you’re in vacation mode.

After mortgage preapproval, lenders keep a close watch on your finances. While you’re traveling, avoid making any unexpected large purchases or opening new lines of credit (like signing up for that airline credit card offer after too many tiny bottles of wine on the plane). Doing so could affect your credit score or debt-to-income ratio, potentially putting your loan approval at risk.

Ultimately, buying a house while enjoying summer travel is possible if you plan ahead and remain reachable by phone or email. It all depends on how you prefer to spend your time.

“Life is short, so live your life as much as you possibly can,” Stearns says. “Don’t let a vacation stop you from buying a house, and don’t let buying a house stop you from going on vacation. Just know it’s going to be a little bit of extra work.”

Abby Badach Doyle writes for NerdWallet. Email: abadachdoyle@nerdwallet.com.

The article Yes, You Can Balance Homebuying and Summer Travel originally appeared on NerdWallet.

NEW YORK — “Judge Judy” Sheindlin sued the parent company of the National Enquirer and InTouch Weekly on Monday for a story that she said falsely claimed that she was trying to help the Menendez brothers get a retrial after they were convicted of murdering their parents.

The story was first published on InTouch Weekly’s website on April 10 under the headline “Inside Judge Judy’s Quest to Save the Menendez Brothers Nearly 35 Years After Their Parents’ Murder,” according to the lawsuit, filed in circuit court in Collier County, Florida.

A version of the story later appeared in the National Enquirer, a sister publication to InTouch Weekly also owned by Accelerate360 Media. The 1989 Menendez murders in Beverly Hills, California, was a case of some tabloid renown.

Sheindlin said she’s had nothing to say about the case. Her lawsuit speculated that the news outlets used statements in a Fox Nation docuseries made by “Judi Ramos,” a woman identified as an alternate juror in the first Menendez trial, and misattributed them to the television judge.

There was no immediate comment from Accelerate360, whose attempt to sell the National Enquirer last year fell through.

Sheindlin does not ask for a specific amount of damages, but made clear it wouldn’t be cheap.

“When you fabricate stories about me in order to make money for yourselves with no regard for the truth or the reputation I’ve spent a lifetime cultivating, it’s going to cost you,” she said in a statement. “When you’ve done it multiple times, it’s unconscionable and will be expensive. It has to be expensive so that you will stop.”

Sheindlin, who hosted the syndicated “Judge Judy” through 2021 and now hosts “Judy Justice,” has had run-ins with the Enquirer in the past.

In 2017, the newspaper retracted and apologized for stories that falsely claimed she suffered from Alzheimer’s disease and depression and had cheated on her husband.

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Harnessing the body’s own cells to fight disease, long a medical dream, is finally a reality.

Now comes the bill.

Last month, Stanford became the first hospital in the nation to use a new $515,000 cell therapy to treat a patient with advanced melanoma. A related approach, costing $420,000 to $475,000, is offering hope to patients with lethal blood cancers.

Meanwhile, cells fixed by gene therapy can slow, even stop, the progression of intractable diseases like sickle cell or beta thalassemia — for the extraordinary price of $2.1 million to $4.25 million each.

Stanford cell therapy technologist Thomas Orozco thaws the treated immune cells from a patient with advanced melanoma. The cells are collected from the patient’s tumor and fortified in a laboratory to better fight the cancer.

This is the future of medicine, experts agree. But the cost of this new class of medical treatment is raising alarm about availability and affordability, even as its potential grows. It’s time to re-imagine our payment models, they said.

“Cell and gene therapies have the possibility to transform thousands of lives but only if we ensure sustainable access to them for all patients,” said Sarah Emond, president of the influential Institute for Clinical and Economic Review, a Boston-based nonprofit that assesses the value of medicines.

The prices aren’t yet unmanageable, because so few people are currently treated. Patients must travel to designated treatment centers, and too few are referred by community physicians. But demand should increase as more treatments are introduced that serve a wider population.

Most health insurers in the United States aren’t set up to support one-time personal therapies that deliver long-term benefits, at unprecedented prices.

“These are precision medicines,” said Dr. David Miklos, chief of the Stanford Bone Marrow and Cell Therapy Program, where hundreds of cancer patients have been treated with the CAR-T cell therapies. “It’s different than buying a pill at the CVS pharmacy that can work for anybody.”

It is a triumph decades in the making. The promise of cell and gene therapies has ​long intrigued scientists​, but progress was slow, with many setbacks. Now FDA-approved products are entering the clinic.

“The technology to bring it to life has finally caught up with the ideas behind it,” said Stanford assistant professor of medicine Dr. Allison Betof Warner, who is conducting Stanford’s melanoma trial.

Cell-based strategies are delivering the most celebrated cancer treatments to emerge in decades.

In one approach, called chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy, patients’ immune cells are collected and genetically modified to better fight lymphoma, leukemia, and, most recently, multiple myeloma.

Another uses a different approach, enlisting tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes, or TILs. These immune cells are harvested from the tumor, fortified in the lab and then returned to the patient. In clinical trials, about 30% of patients had their incurable melanoma tumors shrink or disappear.

“I’m very happy that it’s here now. … I’ve been walking the tightrope and I didn’t fall off,” said a Stanford patient, who asked not to be identified.

Gene therapy also uses engineered cells, with genes replaced, deleted or inserted. On Wednesday, Kendric Cromer, a 12-year-old boy from a suburb of Washington, D.C., became the first person in the world with sickle cell disease to begin an FDA-approved gene therapy. Stanford and UCSF will both offer this treatment.

Dr. Allison Betof Warner of Stanford Health Care provided a new cell-based therapy for a patient, who asked not to be identified, with metastatic melanoma. The one-time treatment, which costs $515,000, uses immune cells harvested from the patient’s tumor.

Scientists are now working to expand the therapies’ repertoire to attack solid tumors, autoimmune diseases, aging, HIV and more.

“It’s just the beginning of a new era,” said biochemist Wendell Lim, director of the UC San Francisco Cell Design Institute.

“It shows that we can take a living cell and change what it does, so it makes new sorts of decisions and carries out complex actions. It processes information, like a little computer,” he said. “This is very different from a static thing, like a chemical.”

It’s still early, and few patients are taking advantage of these new groundbreaking therapies, said physicians.

Why? Word hasn’t yet gotten out, so sick people aren’t getting referred from their community physicians, said Miklos. Treatment is risky. Or patients may live far away from the nation’s estimated 30 “centers of excellence,” like Stanford and UCSF, and are daunted by the cost of travel and housing.

Payment isn’t guaranteed; it’s decided on a case-by-case basis. Medicare and MediCal cover the cost of care when it is determined to be medically necessary.  So does Kaiser.

The great majority of private insurers cover treatments, although sometimes back-and-forth negotiations are needed, said Gary Goldstein, who oversees the business operations of Stanford’s Blood & Marrow Transplant Program.

The sticker price just covers parts — no labor, no warranty. Drug prices aren’t regulated, like utilities, and there is no cap on what a company can charge.

The total cost for gene therapies over the next decade has been estimated to reach an eye-popping $35 billion to $40 billion. The bill for future cell therapies, which could help a bigger pool of patients, will likely be higher.

Drug makers argue that the prices reflect the powerful clinical benefit and the risks and uncertainties of development. A one-time therapy for a chronic condition may actually save money, they add, by sparing a lifetime of care.

“We’ve never cured patients with a single treatment before,” said UCSF’s Dr. Greg Allen, who is designing immune cell therapies for notoriously difficult-to-treat tumors, like those of the pancreas and lung. “So it’s very exciting.”

For some patients, it may be their last best chance.

“I don’t think there’s a price on a life,” said Stanford’s Betof Warner. “These are patients who don’t have another option.”

If millions of people are helped, as hoped, it will create budget pressures on the federal government and larger payers, while smaller employers, state Medicaid plans, and regional health plans may find providing access financially impossible, warn economists. Health care costs are already outpacing inflation, climbing 7% this year.

“It’s going to put a lot of stress on the system,” said Edwin Park at the Georgetown University McCourt School of Public Policy.  “But the issue is critical because you don’t want the high price of these therapies to result in low-income people not being able to access them.”

Already, governments and commercial insurers are scrutinizing treatments’ effectiveness. Some are imposing strict restrictions on who is eligible. They’re asking manufacturers for discounts and rebates.

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Scientific advances could cut costs, said Lim. One idea is to design cells that are immunologically universal, so that a single source could treat many patients. Another is to build a large “cell bank” of precursor stem cells. A third is to ask the body to do its own manufacturing, by introducing an engineered virus that can fix cells.

If manufacturing is localized — making the cells at Stanford or UCSF, for instance, rather than at distant drug companies — that would bring costs down, said Miklos.

As competition grows, prices will fall, he predicted.

Meanwhile, the health care system must focus on finding innovative payment solutions, said Emond.

One proposal is to amortize how much insurers pay over time, like a home mortgage. Another is for drug companies to provide a prorated refund if a patient doesn’t improve — a “pay for performance” model. Yet another option would be a subscription-based approach, like Netflix, where insurers shell out a monthly fee to access however much therapy is needed.

Each condition, therapy and payer is unique, so a single solution won’t satisfy all situations.

“As we look to the future,” said Emond, “this is a moment where we can discuss how to do things differently.”