Let’s say that you buy a home in cash and have 100% paid off. Could you still lose it somehow?
If you don’t pay your taxes, yes
HoA fees
Eminent domain but they will pay you “market value”
Being force into a sale due to investor taking over a condo building
Property taxes of most primary dwellings should not be a thing.
This is how you get subscription-only fire departments.
Commerce and wealth-based taxes (income, sales, capital gains, etc) are sufficient to cover any and all social needs. Taxing people on their own possessions - especially those critical to living - is beyond unethical, it is evil.
A property tax on a primary dwelling residence is unethical because it is not attached to any act of commerce. It is your home. It is your family’s life and legacy. Property taxes do not care whether the owners are billionaires or do not have a penny to their name, so they harm the middle class and the poor while it’s little more than an afterthought for the wealthy. Case in point: Hawaiians who are forced to sell their ancestral homes because they cannot afford property tax… because the “value” of their ancestral land is constantly and steadily increased by wealthy interlopers. This is just plain, old-fashioned banditry and theft - nothing more and nothing less… and if you advocate for it or justify it, you advocate for evil.
So many bad arguments here.
My property tax is $1200 a year. Failure to pay that for a while (a year or three) could result in the state selling the house, keeping the overdue taxes, and paying me the rest (if there is any. Sometimes they get sold cheap).
The state can also buy my house from me under eminent domain, to put in a rail line, or power lines, or some other utility. They’d owe me “fair value” for it, but they basically determine what that means, and it could be significantly less than what i could sell it in the market for (but to be fair, taxes are based on “fair value”, and almost everyone quietly allows the state to low-ball their property value because of this).
It can also be condemned. If it’s egregiously not maintained and shows obvious signs of structural issues, or the property gets hoarded up and looks like a trash dump. This is much more common with commercial property.
There’s also civil asset forfeiture. If you’re manufacturing and/or selling drugs/weapons/etc. (as a random example. Any crime counts really) on a property, it can be seized outright with no requisite compensation at all.
HOAs ar often described as similar to asset forfeiture, but they’re closer to a tax siezure. The HOA has to have in its charter that they can fine members for rule violations, and the process for an HOA is the same as for overdue taxes, but with unpaid fines. The authority for HOA is entirely contractual, you have to sign a contract agreeing to those rules.
All of these are incredibly rare occurrences, and usually involve some sort of genesis, like an investor wants a specific property, neighbors hate someone, etc.
Back in the neighborhood I grew up in, we actually had a drug house that was taken by civil asset forfeiture. They had an RV/trailer (IDK which it was) in their driveway that people would go into for drug related shit and at one point a vehicle was set on fire in the middle of the night, probably to destroy the evidence it was stolen. I’m glad the drug selling scum were taken care of, especially since there were kids on the block.
There are two kinds of asset forfeiture: civil and criminal. Criminal would be what you describe, if you are convicted they can seize any property involved in the crime. Civil asset forfeiture is something else, and it often abused to take things where the crime is only suspected. (It was originally supposed to be used to take property involved in a crime, such as an empty pirate ship, where the owner is not known.)
Yes. It happened to my friends. They both lost their jobs and couldn’t pay the property tax on their fully paid-off house, so it was foreclosed and auctioned off.
There’s also eminent domain and HOA’s
Eminent domain has been used a lot in the past to target minority groups.
How much is the property tax?
This is Texas which has no income tax, so they have high property tax. It’s about 1% per annum based on the appraised value of the property. Plus if it’s a newer neighborhood, you pay an extra amount for the cost of infrastructure until it’s paid off, usually called a MUD (municipal utility district) tax. Mine is an extra 1.2% so I’m paying roughly $1200/month in property taxes for my residence.
Christ on a bike, do they at least lube the dildo they fuck you with?!? 😳
Americans ultimately do pay a lot of taxes in the end. It does towards all sorts of stuff at multiple levels but the greatest impact on individual lives is at the state level.
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Brother my entire mortgage is 834/mo including escrow and I bought in a city in 2020
Remind me to never move to texas
I like to say that in Texas, you never actually own your home.
1% is a pretty normal amount for an urban area, but it’s usually a combination of county and city. If the state of Texas has a 1% tax on top of county and city taxes, that’d be pretty high.
No, that’s county, city, and school district
The property tax is based on the assessed value of the property. (Which can change over time, even if you bought it years ago.) And the tax ranges from 0.28% in Hawaii up to 2.49% in New Jersey. Most states are around 1%. There may also be local taxes from a county or city, which is typically a small fraction of the above.
Depends on where you live. Here in Washington state we don’t have an income tax, so our property taxes are one of the few ways the government has to collect taxes. For that reason our property taxes are much higher than states that have multiple ways to collect.
One thing to keep in mind is that in the US, there’s very few people or companies that actually own the land that they’re on. Most of the time you have the rights to use the land for certain types of things, but not actually own it. The US government (federal on down) has various ways of seizing property for its own purposes.
There’s only a handful of people who actually own the land they live on. Most of them were granted the land by prior governments (mostly Spain) before the US was a country. Their ownership was grandfathered in and has passed via inheritance through the families. Several of those family plots are in Texas and Florida. Everyone else is just allowed to stay as long as they play ball with the rules.
Do you have more info on those that actually own? Sounds interesting.
To certain extents, I think the government has rights of expropriation of land in other countries too. Sometimes you can sue the government for it too. It’s a messy biz.
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They aren’t saying the us government can take land in like France whenever. But like Canada has expropriation laws available where if needed Canadian land can be seized from the land owner, usually with compensation.
This is often done for things like infrastructure, highways and such. Turns it from needing the owner to be willing to sell into “we are buying this land now, heres what we think the land was worth”
I’m talking about the respective government of the country in question, not the US government…
Eminent Domain, I think it’s called. I know around the DC area, a lot of people lost houses, businesses, and properties to make way for more highways in the last 50 years.
This sounds dubious. Sources?
You can get eminent domain’d or your house could be destroyed by natural disaster, house fire, etc.
In theory, in the case of eminent domain you get the value of your home paid. In practice… its often not enough to actually buy a similar house.
You get a government set rate for the house, not what it could sell for on the open market.
Theoretically eminent domain still exists but it’s only used to replace black neighborhoods with highways
Not true! It’s also used to seize property from existing owners in order to hand it off to private developers (see Kelo v. New London).
But when we want passenger rail we have to buy the land at full price as set by the landowner no matter how much they’re gouging
That’s not so much losing your home as it is having it forcibly purchased from you at a fair market price. At least in theory.
Yep, you only think you own your home after it’s paid off. Try missing a single property tax.
Absolutely. You have to pay taxes on your property (in most states; there may be exceptions that I’m not aware of). If you don’t pay your taxes for a long enough period of time, your property will be seized and auctioned off. Starting bids on property auctions are usually the back taxes; in less desirable areas–such as undeveloped land that with no utilities that’s out in the middle of nowhere–that may be all it costs.
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ooh I didn’t know that! someone without insurance rear-ended my vehicle but I chose not to pursue it because then my own insurance rates would’ve gone up. But heck I didn’t know I could have gotten a house out of it 😄 okay but judging by the state of that guy, I doubt he had a very glamorous living situation.
You could own a room in a crack-house
Honestly I doubt he had even THAT much going for him ☹️
I mean, you could rent that out for a couple grand nowadays. “Market rate” baby.
That sounds like the premise for a new Tim & Eric series.
Side bitch pnp
If you’re injured, or have a lawyer and doctor say you were, yeah… you don’t literally get their house but they might have to sell it to pay you. More often, their insurance company would pay.
You probably wouldnt have gotten the house. Rather he’d have to sell it to pay the debt.
someone without insurance rear-ended my vehicle but I chose not to pursue it because then my own insurance rates would’ve gone up.
Somehow, this sounds deeply wrong. Your insurance should cover you regardless of what happens. If it’s an act of god, the insurance company should just swallow those costs. If it’s caused by a third party who is not their customer, they should go after the company that insured the other party, or the other party directly if uninsured.
No matter what the circumstances, if you are not at fault you should never see an increase in your rates, no matter how catastrophic the damage or the costs to make it right.
Huh ok that’s good to know
Yes.
This was the whole premise of Happy Gilmore. He became a pro golfer to save his grandma’s house
Eminent domain baybee
Oh, also if you’re under investigation for anything, the cops can just confiscate your house, car, possessions, whatever. Even if you’re found not guilty, you don’t get anything they took back. Typically it will get sold at a discount, typically to a cop. You’ll often see them on twitter taking pictures with their fancy new car that they dragged someone out of a month ago. It’s called asset forfeiture, and iirc It’s the second or third most prevalent from of theft in America, wage theft being the first.
If you fall behind on your property taxes, the local taxing authority can foreclosure on the property.
A common way that I don’t see mentioned here is that it is common to take out a loan using your home as collateral, something like a major business loan not panning out or a mismanaged personal loan can absolutely end up letting the bank seize your house to pay off the loan.
There are typically property taxes you have to pay every year, unless exempt
