I picked a bad decade to buy a house .....

I hate them, esp. the ones that buy SUVs and don't bother to learn how to actually drive in the snow. Damn them all!

 

I'd love to move out to California, but word on the street is to keep an eye out for these local street punks

 

Because other than the small number of people who were smart/lucky enough not to get burned, people are basically very greedy and very shortsighted.

5.25% fixed should make anyone jump for joy, but dangle a 4,5% ARM in front of them, and they can't resist that teaser first-year mortgage payment.

Or if they are looking at a house they just loooooooove but realistically can't really afford or qualify for . . . then the bank will come back with, "Maybe you can afford it . . . with a 1-year ARM at 4.5% you come in just under the threshhold where you will qualify."

And so they choose the $350,000 house they can't afford instead of the perfectly fine $275,000 one they could have afforded.

 

It probably is progress if you already owned a home when they started coming in. Their properties' values are probably getting a nice bump, too.

 

Property values going up is a double-edged sword.

Sure, if you are selling, then it's wonderful. But if you are not, all it means is higher taxes.

I feel bad for some of the old-time farmers who have farms and ranches in areas that become boom towns. All of a sudden, their 1,000 acrea dairy farm in the middle of tourism central is 'worth' more than they can afford to keep. A $5,000/year property tax becomes $50,000 because each acre is suddenly valued at $50,000 in the eyes of developers that want to put townhomes all over the place.

That's where progress is also anti-progress in some ways.

 

I bought a three-bedroom house with an office for $100K. Put in a yard, auto sprinklers, fence, a tree, some landscaping, etc. I put it on the market last summer thinking I'd make out like a bandit, and I had an offer of $140K (fell through due to the dumbass realtors). Now I'm not sure what it's worth, but I'm a block from an elementary school and two from the grocery store construction site.

The problem is that new houses just keep going up and I'd like to know who the hell is buying them. Most are now going up even if there is no buyer. Surely this is flooding the market.

By the way, I had some really shitty realtors so I pulled the house. I had two from the same place over a six-month frame and each quit the company while in the middle of selling my house. So I guess it's off the market now. There's no sign, but I haven't checked for a listing yet and no one has come to take the lock box off my door despite repeated requests. Is there any way to just cut those off?

 

Maybe the old-time farms should just sell off a few hundred acres and set themselves up for life?

 

Perhaps. I was basing my comment on one case where a farmer in a small town near a ski resort was basically forced to sell the family farm because he was hit with a $50,000 tax one year.

The other edge of that sword for him, I guess, is that he sold the farm for a few million dollars. Upside in that regard, but a downside in losing the rural flavor, tradition and open space in favor of condos and townhomes crammed together.

And cran, we need more family farms and fewer corporate farms.

 

Word.

My family land in Alabama, thousands of acres passed down for generations, used to be on the outskirts of town where the roads weren't even paved until the '80s. Of course, all the farmers died and the widows sold the land to developers. It's all cookie-cutter housing. My grandmother is in her late 80s and lives in a retirement village. Papa's been dead for 10 years. The land and house they built together was sold off in pieces when they retired and tore up the crops and chicken houses. The little plot left is barely a few acres and retned out by my aunt now, who controls half of the land with my dad. Of course, dad is a moron, so my aunt will find a way to screw him out of his half. She's been a business woman all her life and dad is just a factory worker. No contest. And, it's happened before with other stuff. My other aunt has been screaming about getting "her one-third" although no one has died. (For the record, she gets nothing anyway. Some bad blood there.)

So, the quaint idea of taking over the family land when you become your own man has really become fucked up. It's a dead dream of a bygone time. It's a large reason of why I'm such a bitter person.

 

Depends on how often they re-appraise property values in your state.

Here in Texas, they do it yearly. (Fortunately, increases are capped at 10 percent per year and you get a substantial homestead exemption.)

 

Properties in Florida are re-assessed every year.

The good news: If you stay in your home, your assessed value cannot rise more than 3% per year.

The bad news: It basically means many people are stuck in their homes. For if you move, whatever home you buy will be assessed at full market value.

My property tax is $2,800.

If I happened to move into the house next door --- exact same size and floorplan and market value as my current house --- my property tax would be more than $5,000 because the market value of the houses has risen from $130,000 in 1996 to $370,000 today.

 

My grandparents are sitting on farm property on the backside of Big Mountain Ski Resort in Montana. that is now assessed at over $2 million. If it wasn't for my dad paying their taxes every year, they'd have been forced to sell 5 years ago. They're lifelong residents, and when they die my dad and his siblings will have no choice but to sell the property to people who'll build condos for ski bums. It annoys me to no end.