California South Bay Blogs

I wrote recently about filing our own property tax reduction appeal, after receiving tons of junk mail and scam mail from “companies” offering to do this, and after getting a huge tax bill.

The “catch” if you let other people do it for you was that you have to pay a few hundred bucks up front, but there is no guarantee that you’d get your property tax reduced, because whether or not you get your property tax reduced was up to the Los Angeles County Assessor.

I can see why people wanted to get help doing these forms, though, because the instructions and the form itself can scare the heck outta ya.

I also didn’t realize at first that the “short” form – the 1 pager – wasn’t the true important form that you have to file. The real important form is the one page form with text so small you need a magnifying glass to read it – the one with 3 columns squeezed on a sheet of paper. If the form you’re looking at isn’t giving you a headache or gripping your throat with a deep sense of fear, then you’re not looking at the right one.

Anyway, as can be expected, the LA county folks take a looooooooooooong time to respond. I got a couple of mails after that saying they’ve received it. Of course by then I’d have paid my overinflated property taxes already because I didn’t want to get penalized.

FINALLY, this week I got a letter in the mail with my copy of the appeal I filed. Good. It meant they got my appeal.

TODAY I got a letter in the mail saying “notice of assessed value change”!

Now, the assessed value change wasn’t as low as I had appealed for – even though I based my appeal on the comparable properties sold between Jan 2008 and Mar 2008 as instructed by the forms. STILL, it is a heck of a lot lower – more than $91,000 lower – and while the value is still overinflated, it’s a bit easier to stomach.

Anyone out there “do it yourself” and get a successful property tax reduction appeal? I suspect that if you fill out the form, you’ll surely get approved for a lower tax bill, but you just gotta bear the intimidating forms.

The feds cutting interest rates can mean only one thing: mortgage lenders are jumping at the opportunity to persuade you to refinance your loan!

There’s just one catch: if you happen to be a responsible and conscientious borrower who locked in a jumbo loan at a 30-year fixed rate mortgage, your rates are probably better than what is being offered right now on the market.

At least, that’s what I’ve found: our jumbo loan 30 year fixed rate is 6.0% and as of today, most of the interest rates for jumbo loans hover in the low 6% but generally above 6.0%. I’ve seen some as high as over 7%! It is the non-jumbo 30 year fixed rate mortgages that have the attractive high 5% rates.

Unless you’ve lived in California for decades or traded “up” a house using the equity of your first house during the housing boom, you’re likely to be paying a jumbo mortgage, which is a loan exceeding $417,000.

It’s that time of the year again… speculations abound for the coming year’s housing challenges and home prices.

Yahoo News posted Reuters’ report on a record drop in home prices nationwide, predicting that 2008 will continue to see home prices but 2009 may see a rebound. Washington Times looked at who’s to blame in the current housing debacle, comparing this cycle of housing bust with previous busts, and suggesting that “some combination of easy money, loose lending, greed and fraud” turned a housing boom into a bubble. Read the rest of this entry »