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1) Furniture which is well engineered and takes advantage of rectangular shapes
2) Very attractive women
3) Tasty meatballs
4) Their pronunciation of certain words is very amusing to the point of fascination
To the equity thieves that interjected their thoughts into this discussion, don't move to Austin. We're hard working Texans and I don't want to subsidize your welfare by an equity event you are planning to accumulate but will miserably fail to accomplish. Your business model relies on banks carrying your bad credit. I have no problem with anyone moving to Austin or Texas. With that said, some of these posters are equity theives who never really paid for anything.
Who are these equity thieves? Am I missing something here?
property tax in texas is too high, compared with Nevada and states like that. house bubble is more severe in south ca and the north. Nevada, florida and south ca share one thing in common, none of them has a self-sustainable industry.
I used to feel that way but I think the high property taxes have done 2 very important things for Texas:
1. Kept RE prices more stable as compared to the rest of the nation, and
2. Provided a more stable source of tax revenue.
California is in a mess, in part, because it disproportionately relies on income tax revenue from higher income earners since Real Property Taxes are so low. Problem is, that higher income earners have income that drastically fluctuates during boom and bust times leaving the state in a feast and famine cycle of tax revenue generation. Very unstable.
While I despise the "astronomical" property taxes here, I have been converted and now support of them.
If someone is 70K underwater on their mortgage, then some theft has obviously occurred.
Was the situation due to:
a) a HELOC(s)?
b) dropped value after purchase?
if the answer is "a" then you are guilty, if the answer is "b", then the person who sold it to you is guilty.
Pretty nasty and false presumption you make there jobert.
We put an $80k downpayment down on our dream house and we lost that $80k and a further $70k. It seems that everyone around us used exotic loans while we did the RIGHT THING and put 20% down and got a conventional fixed rate mortgage using actual documented income and a superior credit score.
No HELOC(s). We are victims of our fellow man and a mortgage lending industry that gave money to every loser with a lie. I can go on all day about our bitterness; That is California, that is MY HOME!!!
No equity thief here. Also, even if I did strip the house of equity with second loans, the fact that we are holding on and paying off the mortgage rebuts your unfounded accusation of thievery.
I will concede however that some of that $70k we need to get out from under the house includes brokers commissions and fees that we will incur when we go to sell.
Last edited by XLadylawX; 08-26-2010 at 08:55 AM..
property tax in texas is too high, compared with Nevada and states like that. house bubble is more severe in south ca and the north. Nevada, florida and south ca share one thing in common, none of them has a self-sustainable industry.
The center of the motion picture industry is in S. California. LA is home to six Fortune 500 companies.
As for property taxes the downside is homeowners can be priced out of their neighborhoods via gentrification and retired people keep paying forever. Then there is all the nonsense about appraisals and protests. Sorry but I don't think one system is better than the other
if the answer is "a" then you are guilty, if the answer is "b", then the person who sold it to you is guilty.
Quote:
Originally Posted by XLadylawX
Pretty nasty and false presumption you make there jobert.
Explain
Quote:
Originally Posted by XLadylawX
We are victims of our fellow man.
So you fall into the "b" category: the person who sold it to you is guilty: the lender and the seller - exactly like I said. Whomever sold you the house in CA dodged a 150K bullet.. sounds like thievery to me. I am really sorry to hear about it, truly I am. The point I am elaborating upon is that theft was occuring during the RE bubble era. Watch an archived 2007 episode of "Flip this House" on the HG channel, and you can see this theft happening in broad daylight.
It sounds as if Texas is being painted as the nation's best hope, in a country that is skewing libertarian....call it the apotheois of libertarianism...no state taxes, little corporate taxes/meddling, little to no union presence, little to no regulations on energy usage/production/pollution from the same throughout the pipeline, little to no state services typically seen in high tax states like Cal and Mich that are going bankrupt....and a real estate market that wasn't seen as a driver of the state economy/personal ATM machine....
..and Texas seems to be reaping the benefits of all that, perhaps creating a paradigm of workable Libertarianism that could hold sway nationally as well...
The center of the motion picture industry is in S. California. LA is home to six Fortune 500 companies.
As for property taxes the downside is homeowners can be priced out of their neighborhoods via gentrification and retired people keep paying forever. Then there is all the nonsense about appraisals and protests. Sorry but I don't think one system is better than the other
You bring up an interesting point, vbg, in that if the rates go up, and/or the FHA tightens up qualifying ratios even more, the high real estate taxes could make qualifying for home loans very challenging...yes, it has helped steer the state from bad loans, but could help shut down the home buying process as well, all things being equal....thats the down side, and something the state would be stuck with....could be the X factor that shuts down the residential lending market in Austin, as well as Texas...
So you fall into the "b" category: the person who sold it to you is guilty: the lender and the seller - exactly like I said. Whomever sold you the house in CA dodged a 150K bullet.. sounds like thievery to me. I am really sorry to hear about it, truly I am. The point I am elaborating upon is that theft was occuring during the RE bubble era. Watch an archived 2007 episode of "Flip this House" on the HG channel, and you can see this theft happening in broad daylight.
The way I see it, the money actually never existed.....except in a Ponzi-scheme-ish way.....the last one holding the bags paid for the whole song-and-dance that preceded them....and a large share are deciding they DON"T want to pay for it, and are either selling short or walking away from the whole thing...
---and to get back to Texas, the ponzi-scheme never took hold here....folks were busy making and generating real money and goods, not just creating "paper" out of thin air.....and still are, which is why so many running from states that relied on that ruse are flocking to Texas....False economies in Florida, Nevada, and California had to fall eventually. It gets more complex than that. California has much, very much, to fall back on...a Defense Industry, great universities, the incubus and headquarters of the nations' software, computer, and web industry, and the center of the entertainment industry(music and film)...will just take them a little time to get back on their feet....
I can't say the same about Nevada and Florida, and, to a lesser extent, Arizona(who seems to be preoccupied with the smokescreen issue of illegal immigration)....Nevada has been operating on a false economy for years, with only a matter of time before the gaming industry collapsed..Fla has relied on tourism to a very unhealthy degree, and has a local wage scale that cannot prop up the state's economy without a steady influx of out-of-state dollars, which they are not getting now....Arizona has the same problems, to a lessor extent, relying on steady growth to pay bond issues and such, with no way to pay for the same once the growth game stops, which it has..AZ has net lost pop for the first time in decades this year, same as florida......
Texas was and is the only bastion of financial normality in the bunch...which explains why it is still hanging on while everything/one else is falling apart.
So, you're blaming people who bought high priced houses for the cost of the house? It was supply and demand, and your choices were either buy at the price the market would bear or not buy at all. Hindsight is 20/20, of course, but no one could have predicted how big the bubble actually would be and how much prices would fall.
We know plenty of people who are underwater, and it isn't on gigantic homes either. Try tiny THs that were priced from $300-500K. And this isn't anywhere close to downtown DC - we are WAY out in the burbs.
We're lucky to have bought in 2003 and prices in our area are still above that price point, which will hopefully provide us with some cash for a decent down payment on a house in Austin. But it makes me sad to think people believe that those who bought in the markets that had a bubble were somehow bad people - we're not.
California is a mess all around, but the real estate taxes are a special kind of mess. They only reassess property values every time the house sells, not every year. I can't remember the number of that Proposition, but it passed in the 70s, I believe?
One last point - Texas is not immune to the real estate mess. I've seen listings online for short sales and foreclosures in your area. The problem is not as widespread for several reasons, but it isn't absent.
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