In the USA, can you lose your home even after it is 100% paid off?
In the USA, can you lose your home even after it is 100% paid off?
Let’s say that you buy a home in cash and have 100% paid off. Could you still lose it somehow?
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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.
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
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.
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.
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.