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.
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In my understanding a lein doesn’t usually lead to disclosure, they just make sure they get paid when it’s sold.
Lien** and for the person you replied to
Also “foreclosure,” not “disclosure.”
Can you be foreclosed on when you own out right? Seems like mortgage terminology.
The mortgage is a type of lien. But there are other kinds of liens, such as when a contractor works on your house, and you didn’t pay them, they can place a lien on the property until you pay. In the worst case, a contractor could forclose and force the sale to cover the debt.
The sentence in question was:
a lein doesn’t usually lead to disclosure
I don’t know if “foreclosure” is the right word to describe a forced sale due to a lien, but I do know the person didn’t mean to write “disclosure” instead.
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In some states if you hire a contractor to do work, and they hire some guys and doesn’t pay them, those guys can put a lien on your house even if you payed the contractor. 😳
That’s why large projects require a performance bond and a payment bond. The performance bond covers the project, the payment bond covers subcontractors.
Not sure what the feasibility is for a household project, but it’s always good to look for a contractor who is licensed, bonded, and insured and ask for those documents before signing.
Absolutely. I work in the building material supply industry, and everyone in the office hates having to do a lien on a homeowner. It’s rare because we have pretty strict requirements on whom we give credit accounts.
(they have way too much power)
I’ve heard a lot of horror stories about HOAs and I’m certain there are a statistically significant number of bad eggs.
However, that’s definitely not all of them, and in fairness to the HOAs that actually do shit (like mine): maintaining communal property costs money, running communal utilities like heating and cooling costs money, paying groundskeepers costs money, insurance and lawyers and regulatory compliance costs money, etc.
If someone isn’t paying those fees, everyone else’s costs go up and that isn’t fair to the rest of the community. It’s usually a lot of (expensive) legal work to confiscate a domicile, so it’s not the first solution a collection of middle-class homeowners reaches for.
It’s good you have a good one, but the big issue with them is they have almost no oversight at all. They almost function as little privately owned fiefdoms with extremely broad powers over anyone under them. Yours might be good now, but there have been plenty of examples of a good HOA being bought by a corporation and then becoming tyrannical almost overnight. There’s a whole industry of HOA management companies out there, and they are bad news. The last time I saw the statistic something like 80% of new construction in the US is managed by an HOA, too.
Don’t get me wrong, when they work right they serve a purpose, but the lack of laws and oversight of them is pretty scary when you look into it.
HOA’s should not have rules or enforcement power inside city limits. They are duplicating the role of the city. That is different than community maintenance off of public right of way.
Yeah, HOAs for residential neighbourhoods of houses with each house on its own land are bullshit, no question. Those are the ones that don’t actually do anything, though (as far as I can tell anyway).
My HOA does have some petty rules, like specifying the backing colour of drapes or the shape of our windows, doors, etc. Some make a lot of sense, like “your balcony cannot be covered in dog shit” (which I’m paraphrasing but it’s a recent addition spurred by at least one person leaving their balcony covered in it for weeks at a time), or “Damage to communal property by contractors or guests will be paid for by the homeowner contracting the workers/hosting the guests”.
I think part of the problem is that under US law there are few restrictions on contracts that adults enter of their own free will. This approach kind of assumes equal power on both sides which obviously isn’t the case here, or even most of the time.
The other issue of course is that greater regulation requires greater operating cost most of the time (if for no other reason than extra compliance burden), and ends up further raising the bar for citizens to band together and build communal utilities it other improvements that would be too great for a single person to bear.
It’s a tough problem, and curtailing freedoms generally isn’t a winning solution in the US, but it sure does need a solution. We all have enough to deal with; middle managers measuring your grass for a taste of authority aren’t helping anyone.
I live in a townhouse that is one of 30 on our lot. All of the houses are a part of a land trust program that owners have to qualify in order to buy, a minimum income set to ensure applicants can pay a mortgage and a maximum set by the average income of the city. The houses are sold at cost and buyers agree to sell at that cost, plus a small percentage of equity gain per year lived in the house. Property taxes are fixed to this valuation agreement so nobody in the program is forced out of their home from real estate bubbles.
The HOA is responsible for repaving our shared driveway, external window cleaning, gutter cleaning, ect. On three storied townhouses some of those tasks would be difficult for neighbors to manage themselves and kinda ridiculous for each individual to take care of, when pooling resources is a simpler solution.
Your view of HOAs is entirely skewed by suburbia, which is terrible community planning from the onset.
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?!? 😳
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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.
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…
This sounds dubious. Sources?
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.
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.
Yes.
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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
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.
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.
