The county property appraiser has answered my request to increase the market value of the house. They think that I am nuts because I am essentially asking them to increase my taxes. That is wrong in any event. Because of Save Our Homes, my assessed value can’t increase by more than 3% if I stay here, and if I move it actually cuts the taxes in my new home, because it maximizes my SOH credit.
Thank you for contacting our office. I want to make you aware that the value assigned by our office is for tax purposes only, and is not reflective of the resale value of your home. You want this value to be as low as possible. The value we arrived at is what you will pay taxes on. Did this answer your question?
If they had half a brain they would see what we are doing here.
EDITED TO ADD: I told them that I still want my value increased. They replied:
So let me understand your email more accurately: You are requesting that we raise your property taxes?
Now my wife is nervous and says “Are we sure that we know what we are doing here?”
Yes, I am. The Save Our Homes Credit is portable, and increasing the market value on our current home will reduce our taxes in the new house by about $2200 a year.
In 1992, Florida voters were worried about runaway property values causing drastic increases in property taxes from one year to the next. With so many people wanting to move here, property values were climbing rapidly, and this was causing property taxes to skyrocket. Amendment 10 was proposed, which is a benefit of the homestead exemption that provides homeowners protection by limiting the maximum that the assessed value of their home for tax purposes can be raised to 3%, or the CPI, whichever is lower. The Amendment to the state constitution passed, and it became the law of the land in 1995.
How does it work? Like anything that relates to taxes and the government, there is a lot of confusing math involved. Let’s say that you live in a taxing district that taxes your property at a rate of 10 mils, and you bought a starter house at #1 First Ave. for $75,000 in 1993. At the time, the state of Florida had a $25,0000 homestead exemption. You would then owe 10 mils on the $50,000 taxable value of the home, or $500 in property tax each year. Your house was valued at $80,000 in 1994, and you paid $550 in taxes for 1994.
A housing boom hits, prices go way up, and by 1995 your home is now valued at $100,000. Your tax bill would have been $750 (a 50% increase from just 2 years before), but save our homes had gone into effect, so the increase in your home’s assessed value only went from $80,000 to $82,400. That means your property tax was only increased to $574.
Eight more years go by, and you decide in 2003 that you want to sell. Your home is now worth $145,000. Of course, save our homes only has you paying taxes on the assessed value of $104,000, minus your homestead exemption, making your tax bill $790 for the year. Anyhow, you get $150,000 for the place. The tax assessor still says it’s worth $145k, and the guy who buys it will have to pay $1200 in taxes in 2004, assuming the value stays at $145k. (you already paid 2003’s taxes)
You, however, bought your second house at #2 Second Street. You were able to get this one for $240,000. Your portable SOH credit was (145,000-104,000=41,000) so even though the tax guy says this place has a market value of $220,000, you will only have to pay taxes on (220,000-41,000-25,000), making your tax bill $1,540.
Then in 2008, voters approved an amendment that increased the homestead exemption to $50,000 for the non-school portion of property taxes. This complicated things even more, but that is a different topic.
Why do these Amendments keep getting voted on? Whenever the Democrats want more voter turnout, they make sure that something of interest to Democrat voters that will drive voter turnout is on the ballot. Tax cuts in property taxes, legalizing marijuana, increasing the minimum wage, saving baby pigs from the slaughterhouse, things like that.
There is an old saying: a person who is acting as their own attorney has a fool for a client and an incompetent attorney. In this case, we are talking about real estate taxes. We are in the midst of buying a new home. There are a lot of expenses to consider with a move, and taxes are one of them, especially in Florida. Understanding how Florida computes real estate taxes is important, if you want to pay as little in taxes as possible.
This paragraph is specific to how Florida computes real estate taxes. If you aren’t interested in the mechanics of that, you can skip to the next paragraph. When you own real estate in Florida, the county property appraiser assigns your property a “market value” each year. If you live in your home, you can claim it as your homestead, and every year after the first year that you own it, the value can only increase by 3% for taxing purposes, and this amount is called your “assessed value.” The difference between the market and assessed value is called your “Save Our Homes” credit. You subtract your Save Our Homes credit from your market value to arrive at the assessed value, then your homestead exemption ($50,000) from your assessed value, and that is your “taxable value.” The taxing authority where the real estate is located then taxes you on that value, and the amount of tax you own varies by taxing district. (I know that this sounds complicated and it is, but the end result is that there are only 9 states in the US that have a lower tax burden than Florida (we are tied with Louisiana), so there is that.) The reason that I explain this is because the “Save Our Homes” credit is portable, and this is important when moving.
What’s important here is that, when you are moving, you want your old house to be valued as high as possible, and your new house to be valued as low as possible. This will minimize your property taxes going forward. Since we are preparing to move, I got our current home appraised and sent a copy of that appraisal to the county property appraiser’s office. Each August, the appraiser’s office sends every homeowner a copy of the proposed numbers, and you have until September 15 to appeal these numbers. The appraisal that we got from the county was almost $100k less than what the our private appraiser says it is worth. Since this is how our tax credits are calculated, I need to get this fixed, because allowing this to stand will increase our property taxes on the new house by about $2,200 a year for the entire time we own the place.
To do that, you need to apply to the Value Adjustment Board. It’s a sort of tax court that is run by a county magistrate. It’s a legal process, and I think that it is worth our money to hire a real estate tax attorney to handle the process. My wife wants to just do it ourselves because she says lawyers are expensive. My point to her is that we only get one chance to get this right, and screwing it up will cost us more than $22,000 over the next ten years in taxes that we otherwise wouldn’t have to pay. If it costs a grand or two now, a lawyer is well worth the cost going into the future.
Another example of how inflation is getting us in ways we hardly notice. Just a year ago, Hostess Ding Dongs came 12 snack cakes to a box of 17 ounces, making them about 1.4 ounces per snack cake:
Now those same cakes are 10 to a box of 12.7 ounces, making each cake 1.27 ounces. The cakes are smaller, there are fewer of them, and now you pay more to get 25% less.
What he is talking about is Demand side economics, or Keynesian Economics. Named for Economist John Maynard Keynes, who developed his economic theories during the Great Depression of the 1930s, the chief underpinning of this theory is that the demand for goods and services drives economic activity. Keynes believed that unemployment is the result of inadequate demand for goods and services. To solve this, he believed that governments should increase spending to spur economic activity by artificially creating demand.
The problem with this is that low demand causes a matching reduction in production. If a government tries to spur demand artificially by putting money into the economy, the increased demand in the face of reduced supply sees more money chasing a limited supply, which is a key driver for inflation.
Especially since he is providing the increased spending through application of Modern Monetary Theory. Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). says that government spending can be financed by printing money rather than borrowing. Biden is doing both.
So we have large scale government spending coupled with an increase in circulating money supply.
That’s Bidenomics.
Biden and the rest of the Keynesians are wrong- demand isn’t the problem. Demand remains strong, as evidence from the credit sector indicates that credit card debt is skyrocketing.
This marks the first time since 2001 in which credit card debt didn’t fall in the first quarter. In fact, the only times card debt didn’t fall in the first quarter of the year since the New York Fed report began were 2000 and 2001. Every year since, card debt fell at least a little bit — until this year.
The money in circulation (M1) has decreased from $19.4 trillion to $18.5 trillion, so overall savings are increasing while credit card debt is rising. So the overall savings of Americans is increasing while at the same time credit card balances of GenZ and Millennials is increasing to record levels. This indicates that people born before 1981 are beginning to sit on bank accounts, while those born after 1981 are continuing to spend using credit cards.
So what will happen as a result? Rising interest rates, coupled with increasing credit card balances, will cause increasing credit card defaults and banks tightening up their exposure to risk. We are seeing that already, as numbers from the Fed indicate.
According to the most recent delinquency data from the Fed, the 30-day delinquency rate (or the percentage of total outstanding credit card balances currently at least 30 days overdue) rose from 2.25% to 2.43% in the first quarter of 2023. That’s the sixth straight quarter of increases, keeping rates above 2% for the third straight quarter.
It took this nation over 200 years to borrow a trillion dollars. Trump did it in seven months, Obama did it in only 6 months. It took Biden 9 months to borrow his first Trillion dollars, but he soon got better at it. His second trillion took three months, borrowing $2 trillion in his first year. In fact, he has increased the national debt by 118% in just two and a half years.
President Trump increased the National Debt by 134% in four years.
Obama increased the debt by 194% in eight years.
President George W Bush borrowed his first trillion dollars in two and a half years. He borrowed his second trillion a year and a half later. Another two years, another $1 trillion. All told, President Bush borrowed $5 trillion in 8 years, increasing the national debt by 187%.
It took President Clinton 3 and a half years to borrow his first trillion dollars. All told, he borrowed $1.2 trillion in his first term, and $600 billion in his second. He increased the national debt by 140% in eight years.
George HW Bush borrowed his first trillion in 3 years, and he increased the National debt by 170% in four years.
Reagan borrowed his first trillion in 6 years, and doubled the National debt during his eight years in the White House.
Carter increased the National debt by 150%, but “only” borrowed $300 billion in 4 years. I guess that was when $1 Billion was real money.
Ford increased the debt by 147% in 3 years., Nixon by 135% in 5 years, Johnson by 116% in 6 years, Kennedy by 106% in 2 years, Eisenhower by 108% in eight years.
Democrats, and Republicans, both in a contest to see who can spend the most in our society of “how much can you give me if I vote for you.”
Remember when the Biden spokeswoman told us that borrowing trillions didn’t cost anything because it was already accounted for? So that’s where we are- under Biden, the US has borrowed $4.75 trillion in just two and a half years. This can’t continue.
By definition, anything that can’t continue, won’t. There is no amount of voting that will fix this.
One of the things that I have always blogged about is being ready for disasters. A disaster that involves the collapse of society is the one that preppers seem to find the most “sexy” and they spend their time planning on it- stockpiling guns, ammo, food, and the like. The thing with that is, it is also the disaster that we are least likely to experience.
The most likely disaster that we are likely to affect is a personal one. A disaster that affects just you, or your family. A personal disaster may be something as small as a flat tire, or as personally destructive as cancer, or simply being laid off from your job. We cannot know what that disaster will be, but there is a pretty good chance that the best way to fix it will be… money.
Even if that disaster is more widespread- say one that affects your neighborhood, your town, or even the entire county, whether it is a tornado, earthquake, or hurricane, a wildfire, or a chemical spill, one thing that you are always going to need at some point is money.
That’s why it amazes me that 57% of Americans can’t even deal with an emergency that would cost them $1,000. Sure, stockpiling food, ammo, or some other piece of cool gear is more fun, but money is going to be your friend in most disasters at some point. Having $1000 in emergency cash is going to help you out of more disasters than that new ACOG or that second 1911. I know what you are thinking- “Divemedic, didn’t you say that the dollar is in trouble? If I stockpile too many dollars, aren’t I at risk of it becoming worthless?”
You sure are, but it is still important to have a reserve to get you through those personal disasters. The ideal emergency savings fund is to have at least three month’s expenses, but having a year’s worth gives you a level of financial independence that we are all looking for.
Here is what I did, and what I recommend. Put away a few bucks a week. For this example, let’s say that you have $4000 per month in expenses. Soon, you will have emergency funds if you follow this plan:
Have a week’s expenses available in the house in the event of an immediate problem. Not a week’s pay- a week’s expenses. In cash. Seal it in an envelope and squirrel it away somewhere. You can put it in the gun safe, or you can make a “poor man’s safe:” mount an add-on electrical box in the wall, and put a CATV or phone jack plate on it. You can hide the cash in the empty box. For less than $10, you have a place to hide things that thieves won’t look at twice. With $1000 in there, you have emergency cash that is readily at hand, likely won’t be stolen, and it puts you ahead of 57% of Americans. (EDITED TO ADD: I use mixed bills, so in an emergency I have change: 20 $1 bills, 10 $5 bills, 13 $10 bills, 10 $20 bills, 7 $100 bills /End Edit) Now you just have to forget it’s there and not touch it when you need a few bucks to pay for pizza. Self control. That money is for disasters, not as a slush fund.
Now that you don’t have to worry about a flat tire or a broken window. You have a cushion that will make sure that you don’t have to hock your wedding ring, your handgun, or have to go hungry just because of that flat tire. Just remember to replace it if you ever need to use it in an emergency.
Now that you have that emergency stash of a week’s cash on hand, you need to work on hitting a month’s cash. For that, we keep it in a savings account. We have a savings account at the local bank where we keep the rest of a month’s expenses, but we exclude it from being able to be touched with an ATM, so we have to go into the bank during banking hours to get it. That makes sure that we aren’t tempted to spend it for something that isn’t important. Ask your bank, they will tell you how to set it up that way. Putting that money in the local bank means that you have access to it within a day or two. Three week’s cash isn’t so large that we need to worry too much about inflation killing it. Sure, it doesn’t earn any interest to speak of, but it’s only $3000 or so. Not gonna break you. Now that money can be used for a bigger disaster. Your home’s air conditioner just broke, and now you can deal with it. You broke your arm and need to pay the doctor. Something like that is no longer the big problem that it would have been. So you have a week’s cash in the house, and three weeks in the bank. That’s your first month, and now you can deal with $4000 worth of disaster. You are now more prepared for financial catastrophe than 65% of Americans.
Once you are here, use all of your savings money to eliminate your credit card debt, if you have any. Credit cards charge such large interest amounts that they are poison to your financial future. Get rid of the balances on them before you go any further in saving for emergencies. Then start working on the second month of emergency money.
For your second month, you can put it somewhere that makes it less convenient for you to raid. If you have a large disaster, you can get to the money within a week or so, and you can seek out a place where you will get interest. I recommend an Internet bank like Ally, Synchrony, or Capital One. They are offering rates of 4 or 5 percent, and you can transfer the cash into your checking account within a couple of business days if you need it.
For your third month: You can start stockpiling precious metals. The problem with PMs is that you can’t buy and sell for what the metal is worth. The other party to such a transaction wants to make money on the deal, so there is a penalty to buying and selling, but that is an advantage. You see, we can be our own worst enemy when it comes to emergency savings when we spend it for something that isn’t a true emergency. If you lose a little when you sell a PM, you are less likely to be frivolous with your emergency fund.
So for that third month, silver rounds are a great choice. With silver running about $20-25 an ounce, stockpiling half and full ounce silver rounds is a good way to save. Buying a few of them at a time is relatively painless. There are 20 rounds to a tube. Six tubes of one ounce silver rounds, and four tubes of half ounce rounds will weigh in at 160 ounces (ten pounds). That’s $4000 of PM that you can convert to dollars at a slight loss, and if there is a TEOTWAWKI event, you have very tradeable silver “coins” that you can use for trade. If you need cash in dollars, you can sell the rounds (at a slight premium- say 10% off melt value) within a couple of hours or days. When you complete this, you will have an emergency fund that will carry you through an entire quarter without a job, or cover a pretty significant issue like “the house needs a new roof” without getting killed financially. This is a level of independence that three quarters of America don’t have.
Once you get to this point, all of your extra money should go to getting rid of car payments and other major expenses. You don’t have credit card balances, you have 90 days worth of emergency money, not get that monkey off your back. Do you really need a new car every two years? Pay that off, get rid of that monthly payment. It will be easier to save for the next step that way. It will also reduce your monthly expenses by quite a bit, and will allow you to stretch those emergency funds.
For month four, five, and six, we have less of a need for trade, and more of a need to store value. So gold is where you can store a bit of emergency money. Don’t get coins. The premium for coins means paying 5 percent more than if you buy gold bars. Larger bars mean less premium, so the key here is to keep larger bars to reduce the amount you lose while buying and selling, but still make them small enough to be useful for trade. Gold bars are concentrated wealth. They are easy to store or hide.
For month four, buy 5 two gram bars, 4 five gram bars, and a 1 ounce bar. That gives you some flexibility to cash out what you need without cashing out an entire month’s worth of gold. The best part is that together, they weigh only about 2 ounces.
For month five and six, buy a four of the one ounce bars. That is another $8,000 or so. Now you have almost $25,000 in emergency money. That’s enough to get you through half a year of having no money, and gives you a level of financial independence that gets you to the point where losing a job, a major illness, or a pretty significant disaster will not be the major problem that it would have been.
Now concentrate on paying off that house. Pay extra payments towards that mortgage. With no mortgage, your six month’s worth of funds is now a year’s worth, because your monthly expenses are minimal.
It also makes you more stable than 95% of the American public. You can do it with a minimum of heartache, and the peace of mind it gives you is incredible, and now you have “fuck you money” because your house is paid, you have a year’s living expenses in the bank, and you don’t have to worry about the money it will take to deal with most disasters.
Now, the disclaimer: I don’t advertise, and receive nothing for my reviews or articles. I have no relationship with any products, companies, or vendors that I review or recommend here, other than being a customer. If I ever *DO* have a financial interest, I will disclose it. Otherwise, I pay what you would pay. No discounts or other incentives here. I only post these things because I think that my readers would be interested
— Wall Street Silver (@WallStreetSilv) June 21, 2023
I remember a jingle for car loans from the early 80’s, and people were crowing about interest rates being “down” to “only 9.9%” In fact, the Fed set the overnight rate at 17% in May of 1981. The result of this was that auto loans were going for an average of 18%, and that was for someone with good credit. At the end of 1982, auto loan rates were still around 11% for good credit. The average rate now is right around 6%.
She complains that an average house that cost $73,700 would today be worth $230,000. That is because she is using the government inflation figures. Let’s instead use gold as a benchmark. In 1982, that $74,000 house would have sold for 167 ounces of gold. That same 167 ounces would buy you a $347,000 house.
She then goes on to claim that college graduates were getting $33,000 right out of college. She is mistaken. The average college graduate in 1981 received a starting salary of $15,200 a year. Using gold as our metric, that is equal to 34 ounces of gold, meaning that the house in 1981 would cost 4.9 years’ pay. Today, that 34 ounces is worth $66,000 a year.
She is just wrong. Every generation feels like they had it worse than the ones who came before. I’m sure the people who lived through the rationing of WW2, the Yellow fever and polio pandemics of the early 20th century, and the Great Depression would beg to differ.
Human beings only have two ways to deal with one another: reason and force. If you want me to do something for you, you have a choice of either convincing me via argument, or force me to do your bidding under threat of force. Every human interaction falls into one of those two categories, without exception. Reason or force, that’s it.
Marko Kloos, Why the gun is civilization, 2007
At the national level, it is negotiation (diplomacy) or warfare. Warfare is the method of getting an adversary to take a course of action involuntarily. Using or threatening another nation with warfare isn’t the only way to wage war. It can be done with economic force as well. Countries engaging in economic warfare seek to weaken an adversary’s economy by denying the adversary access to necessary resources or by otherwise inhibiting its ability to benefit from trade, financial, and technological exchanges with other countries.
The US and its politicians have for years wielded economic force (sanctions and the like) for decades without realizing just how much resentment it causes. For some reason, our leaders seem to think that everything that happens in the world is something that the US needs to be involved in.
So they use sanctions like a club. They twist the arms of some nations to support them in boycotts, UN decisions, and the like. Each time the US flexes its muscle, dislike and resentment builds. Why? Because these nations are being held at economic gunpoint and are being forced to take an action that is against what they perceive is their best interests. In other words, they are being attacked by the US in economic warfare. This was caused by the US using its economic might as a club to keep other nations in line, rather than using it as a surgical instrument.
Make no mistake, the US has been engaged in economic warfare for most of the post-WW2 period. Who started it? I will leave that to historians, but make no mistake, the US is using the economic advantage its had by being the only nation whose economic base wasn’t wrecked in WW2, backed by pure military might to enforce its will upon the nations of the world. We have been engaged in economic warfare with one nation or another for decades.
This works until the economically and militarily strong nation begins to weaken. COVID, along with the government’s response to it, the fact that our nation’s President is a dotard, and the runaway inflation being caused by profligate spending did exactly that.
So China and the BRICS nations are responding in kind. China is seeing to it that the economic empire that the US has been engaged in maintaining is coming to an end. As the President of the US, Biden’s responsibility is to see to it that the US and its citizens are taken care of. He is too busy lining his pockets and following the instructions of his Chinese masters.
China is a master at long term planning. They have thoroughly infiltrated the US government. From congressmen sleeping with Chinese intelligence agencies to plain old fashioned bribery, the nation’s key government officials have been completely compromised.
So China is following up on its biological warfare attack by counter attacking the US by destroying the dollar. It’s brilliant- they cause a pandemic that the US helped fund the creation of, help fund the gaming of the US election that followed, using that to put one of its assets in charge, then attack the currency while their asset distracts us with a proxy war that China is assisting in.
China isn’t stupid- they know what the US can and can’t do. They are playing the long game while the US spends its time and resources worrying about an inconsequential war between Ukraine and Russia. The US has sent more than $70 billion to Ukraine in the past 16 months, and just budgeted an additional $45 billion in the latest debt ceiling deal.
Meanwhile, the US dollar is being deliberately and systematically attacked. Where does this go? Do the math and tell me what you think in comments…
