A FEW THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS FOR YOU

Good day and I hope you are having a great week.  This week I have some practical strategies for you that may help you save anywhere from few hundreds to thousands of dollars.  What does this advice have to do with The Law of Attraction? Well how you do anything is how you do everything, I heard it said.  If you pay attention, learn, and practice skills in one discipline you most likely will do the same in any discipline. 

When it comes to money, there are probably as many emotions as there are people.  No matter what your relationship with money, it cannot be argued that it is a tool that can make things easier or make things harder depending on how you employ it.  The thing about wealthy people is that they are always learning and staying on top of strategies to make money work for them. The thing with people who struggle financially, is that they allow money to take over their life and make them work for it. I do not really care what you think about money, I just want to give you a single tool to help you have more of it. Just like any skill or tool, it is at the discretion of the student how and if they are going to make use of it. 

If you happen to live in the United States, you have to pay property taxes twice per year on real-estate you own. These taxes help pay for our schools, emergency services, roads, transportation etc. I am not familiar with other countries, so I will limit my discussion to the United States and will leave my international audience to do their due diligence about the regulations in their country as I am sure something similar will exist in many countries.

When it comes to property taxes, we usually pay anywhere from 1 to 2 percent of the value of the home twice annually in taxes.  If you happen to be in California that could be thousands to tens of thousands of dollars every year.  Although paying taxes are not optional, knowing more about the laws can help you pay your “fair” share and not more than you need to. The savings can then be applied to thing that matter to you, or better yet be invested for delayed gratification than can mean exponentially more to you and your family. 

There is a form (Pictured here) that is available through the City Hall office of every city, that literally challenges the value of your home as estimated by the government for the purpose of calculation of your property taxes. Let’s be honest the government is not exactly anxious to bring information to your attention that decreases the amount of taxes you are going to pay to them, and if you do not challenge the status quo you may be paying allot more than your share.   In fact you may have received junk mail about the services that will do this for you for a fee. But it is so simple that you really do not need any of these services.  For a couple of hours in  a week, you can accomplish the same thing. For example when in 2008 the real-estate market in California tanked and my property was devalued by about 60% the value indicated on my property taxes was the same as the previous year.  Hence I make it a habit to challenge that value every 2 years or so and see what happens. There is no cost to the process. It just takes a bit of action to go to the city hall of your city and ask for the form that challenges the stated value of your home as it applies to property taxes.  Just as an example the savings in 2008 for me was over $3,000.  That was a nice start to my kid’s educational investment fund. 

The information needed on the forms are very basic. You obviously need to know the parcel id of the property and depending on the state you may or may not need to contact a realtor and ask them to provide you with the MLS number of some comps or comparable in your neighborhood.  Again here taking the time to talk to the realtor and explaining the reason you are doing this is important as most realtors will want to inflate the value of the home where your purpose for this is to find the lowest comparable you can get your hands on. This process can take at most a couple of hours during your week, and in the end may save you some nice chunk of change. 

I am curious to see if any of my readers were aware of this option, and if you were, did you ever actually take the time to fill out this form?  What was the results? Are you going to try this this coming year? Please make a comment on the questions about this post I will post on my Facebook page.

I hope you enjoyed and benefited from this post.  As always please feel free to share this with anyone who may benefit from this, and please comment on my Facebook page and Twitter feed about this post.  As always I wishyou much success till next week.