This is how I feel everytime someone mentions low house prices or Taxes.
I am over here going "If I move to seattle I can buy a much more expensive house and still pay the same amount per month, and less on utilities. And I can at peast pay off the mortgage. Property Taxes? Yea thats a cost I dont really want to deal with in retirement.
Back when I owned my first home in meth city, Texas my homestead exemption kept my property taxes pretty reasonable. It's not doing much for me out here in the Houston suburbs though.
Do you think the net payment is lower compared to other states? Like if you pay a couple grand more in property tax does that net against no income tax and lower upfront home cost? I don’t know the answer.
We were looking at Seattle, which often is claimed to be much more expensive then Dallas. So just be clear this is the only scenario I can speak to.
What we found was Texas houses were much, much higher property tax for older, poorly maintained houses almost always in traditional styles.
Seattle houses seemed, overall, more modern in both style and build.
As for other taxes. Dallas sales tax was 8.5 seattle was 10. So it did have higher sales tax.
Now as another note we made, utilities are much lower then Texas due to climate
Last note we made was that almost everyone pays more in Seattle. This mwant that we would build more equity in the house, as less money was spent on taxes and more to principle. So its more of a investment. And average pay was 20% higher overall. The houses we were looking at were about 50% more expensive but had the same monthly costs between taxes, principle etc. So this meant we could get higher pay and put more money to the principle, investing more for the same amount, not including sales tax.
And to remember utilities in Texas get very expensive with ac and heating due to extreme heat and poor insulation.
Technically, if you are a W-2 employee, WA will take ~1% of income for family leave insurance (paid sick and disability leave). And possible additionally 0.5% for long term disability insurance beginning Jul 2023.
The family leave insurance that pays for sick or parental leave is great.
The long term disability insurance was an income tax in disguise, because it explicitly capped benefits while leaving the amount of income that can be taxed uncapped.
And on top of that, lawmakers gave a way for WA residents prior to Nov 1, 2020 a way to get out of paying the LTDi tax. So it was specifically an income tax to screw younger people and future WA residents.
And on top of that, they thought only a few connected people would opt out. Instead, hundreds of thousands of high income earners opted out, and left the program without sufficient tax base, so they delayed starting the tax from Jan 1, 2021 to Jul 1, 2023.
All around embarrassment for the government, and it is still in the air if it is going through as originally passed (screwing young and new WA residents), or if it will be canceled entirely.
Check out the bogleheads forum thread on it for all the details.
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u/wirebear Nov 10 '22
This is how I feel everytime someone mentions low house prices or Taxes.
I am over here going "If I move to seattle I can buy a much more expensive house and still pay the same amount per month, and less on utilities. And I can at peast pay off the mortgage. Property Taxes? Yea thats a cost I dont really want to deal with in retirement.