$12k or so isn't uncommon here but $20k? What size house do they have? Sounds like it must be quite large and a nice size piece of property. Damn.
‘I felt like I’d been baited and switched’: Florida homeowner sells her house after property tax bill soars 74%
- Thread starter RBH
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$12k or so isn't uncommon here but $20k? What size house do they have? Sounds like it must be quite large and a nice size piece of property. Damn.
I don't really think it's judgmental boomer bullshit. You can look at the situation through different lenses:
- This person should not have bought the home. Purchasing the home was an objectively poor decision given their financial circumstances.
- We should try to build a world where people can more easily afford housing (and other necessities).
I still don't think this story passes the smell test where someone qualifies for a mortgage at $1600/mo, but then does the most dramatic financial decision, selling their house when it's actually $1700/mo. The article has literally no details and says a bunch of weird shit like "they won't get their downpayment back when they sell," which makes no sense.
Yeah an unexpected $2k a year isn't anything to turn your nose up at, but in the grand scheme of home ownership costs, that's not exactly a huge jump. Something isn't adding up.
PSA- this is not a real article with actual reporting. This is just someone (or maybe even an AI) transcribing and paraphrasing the local news segment that is linked in the article.
And if you watch it you can see where the math error occurs- The 174% percent increase is a direct quote from the home owner and the TV reporter doesn't want to call her math out as incorrect because that would just be really poor form.
And if you watch it you can see where the math error occurs- The 174% percent increase is a direct quote from the home owner and the TV reporter doesn't want to call her math out as incorrect because that would just be really poor form.
This seems like a story of a person who did not plan financially to buy a home, is underwater, and now has used the taxes as a scapegoat.
Actually my sister and her husband used the EXACT same excuse to sell a home they just bought in California, being shocked by huge tax increases but only after the installed solar, saying they're losing out in that investment, and then buying in Florida to avoid this problem! This is shockingly similar.
If you're gonna buy a home, make sure it's within your means. If a $2,000 increase over a year (less than $200 a month) is enough to sink you then you probably couldn't afford that particular home.
Also worth pointing out- this is a two minute local news segment that is heavily edited. Who knows if she is actually really just selling over the tax bill versus other things that may have contributed to her not being able to afford the home anymore that the TV station edited out? Local news is just going to package it to make it palatable for their audience and getting people riled up over taxes is red meat for tons of people.
I would guess they are million dollar homes. Zillow lists Ridgewood's average property as over 1m.
I'm an architect in SWFL and property taxes on some of these homes are in the 6 figures, but it's because the cost of some of these homes are in the 8 figures.
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Well said. So often Era acts like people must be 100% on the side of something when it can very much be "little bit of column A, little bit of column B".
What, even people on recent mortgages with high interest rates?
Given that the premise of the thread is about how high property taxes are, I'd think people would get close to the itemization limit just through SALT.
Unfortunately savings gets us nowhere unless you put almost all of your money aside outside of mandatory expenses towards saving for something.
Personally I don't understand why my mandated car insurance goes up when some State Farm CEO out there made 20 million each of the last two years.
Where have you been? Salt is limited to 10k since Trump tax cuts as a screw you to blue states.
I know, but it gets you close enough to the standard deduction limit that I'm surprised that "almost nobody" would go over the limit with the combination of SALT and mortgage interest, even ignoring other sources of itemized deduction.
I don't own a home, but if my rent was deductible, I would easily pass the standard deduction limit, and I live in a small apartment.
Yeah, it reminds me a bit of COVID discourse. Like I took COVID very seriously; I was basically a hermit for a couple of years, masked 100% of the time I left my house, got vaxxed/boosted as soon as humanly possible, etc., but finally around late-2022, it seemed OK to not mask in public (assuming I didn't have any symptoms/had no reason to believe I was exposed to anything). But to some posters here, admitting to having stopped masking automatically makes you a MAGA COVID denier or something.
