The other day I was agonizing because the county raised the taxes on my paid-off (and hugely devalued) house by $300 a year and on the even more vastly devalued, upside-down house my son and I are copurchasing by $200.
As nothing.
This weekend during the kickoff for this fall’s choir season, one of the potluck dinner guests remarked that the taxes on their house had gone up $1260.
TWELVE HUNDRED DOLLARS! Holy mackerel!
If a tax bill like that had arrived in the mail, my house would have gone on the market the next day. That would make my annual tax bill—on this house alone—around $3,000, almost what I pay now for taxes, homeowner’s insurance, car insurance, and Medigap insurance combined!
Their house is very nice—a relatively new (10 or 12 years?) two-story place on a piece of infill next to a tiny, aging golf course), fenced off with a wall and an electrical gate—but it’s not that fancy. For heaven’s sake, there’s a trailer park across the street! And they’ve got the same slums on the other side of 19th Avenue that I’ve got.
Another person who lives down near M’hijito’s house said their taxes had also gone up, to a lesser extent—something like $600.
So, I guess I’m lucky that I can still afford to live here this year.
And I’d better face the fact that sooner or later the taxes will outstrip what I can afford to pay on a limited income. This house will have to go—when SDXB moved to Sun City, his insurance dropped by 50% and his tax bill was a third of what he was paying here, on a comparable house. (Comparable, except for its being in dreary Sun City…). Since property values were even more severely trashed out there than here in town, I should be able to sell my house here, pick up a place there that doesn’t require a lot of fix-up, and still have money in my pocket. Well, in the car salesman’s pocket: I’d have to buy a lower-mpg car so I could drive into town.
The only other possibility would be to invest the proceeds from this house and use it to rent an apartment. I don’t at all care for apartment living. Well, let’s put it more accurately: I loathe living in apartments. But if I want to keep going to choir and live near my son and my friends, that would be the only option. With a 6 percent drawdown from the most optimistic guess at what I’d clear on the sale of the house, I could afford about $950 a month. At 4 percent, the affordable rental would be around $790. That won’t get you much around this place, especially with half the population displaced from their houses and trying to rent.
As for the downtown house…I don’t know what we’d do if they raised the taxes that high. Default, probably. We’re already at the limit of what we’re willing to pay on a worthless piece of property.
Well, it’s off and running. After an incredibly hectic week, a relatively normal one is coming up…but before it starts I have to manually vacuum the storm debris out of the pool, and it’s already 6:20 in the morning.
Property Taxes in my neck of the woods is absolutely insane. I have a 1600 square foot TOWNHOUSE and my taxes are $4,500!
Friend of mine lives in Minneapolis; pays 10 grand in property taxes. They have money…but it’s an old house and not THAT out of the ordinary.
Hope you’re maintaining your equilibrium during all the dust storms. Are you guys being punished?
It’s not as bad as the sensation-hungry elements in the media would have you think.
The dust is coming from the acres and acres of desert that were bladed for subdivisions and then never built out, and from the ghost tracts that are standing empty, the yards around the vacant houses never covered in crushed granite (Arizona’s answer to the lawn). Where the dirt would have been held in place by natural vegetation and a surface called “desert varnish,” the disturbed topsoil is picked up in a stiff wind to form large dust clouds. This is especially true in the Phoenix area when the wind comes in from the south and west, blowing through Maricopa, one of the hardest-hit ghost suburbs in the Valley.
And it’s what you get when you blade the irreplaceable Sonoran desert at the rate of an acre an hour…
Something similar led to the Dust Bowl: poor plowing practices disturbed the topsoil in such a way that when drought was followed by wind the dirt went airborne easily.
Which leads us to the same old conclusion: He who does not know history is doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past.
Property taxes are such a turn-off! Yuck.
@ William: Not nearly as much a turn-off as ill-educated children emanating from a school system that ranks fiftieth in the nation in quality.
It does sound like your house is much more preferable than those other places. Maybe you could get a roommate to cover some of the expenses. With four bedrooms you should be able to squeeze someone in. I have a four bedroom house, too. I rented out the entire upstairs (two bedrooms and a bath) and it pays half my mortgage every month. 🙂
Our assessment dropped almost 40% but the county raised taxes a bit to help them out. I do anticipate our over all tax bill to drop from $1400 to about $900.