I don’t think property taxes are the problem. They’re not great, but not terrible like NJ – 2% and crappy roads, services, etc – but you don’t have to pump your own gas.
The issue is that they allow to homeless to setup anywhere while not providing other options. It’s definitely cheaper just to create a town in the middle of nowhere somewhere in CA, and move all the homeless there. Give them some basic food and shelter at 50% the cost of doing the same thing in LA/SF/SD.

The inner city has always been the place where the poor and homeless live (at least since the 1950’s).

Don’t know why anyone thought it was a great idea to try to gentrify the inner city displacing the poor etc…

Anyway not so much an issue out in the sticks where I live.

[quote=EJ]Just curious … why pay the second installment now? I always wait until April 10, the last day without penalty. Is there any advantage to pay early?[/quote]

no, besides remembering to pay them versus forgetting April 10

[quote=flu][quote=EJ]Just curious … why pay the second installment now? I always wait until April 10, the last day without penalty. Is there any advantage to pay early?[/quote]

no, besides remembering to pay them versus forgetting April 10[/quote]

At some point in the past, I paid 3 installments in one year for tax reasons. So now I’m on the schedule where I pay both of my payments at the end of the year.

[quote=flu]
Before it could work for you because the year you paid the property tax would be the year that they would go on your itemized deductions. For some it didn’t matter because you were getting hit with AMT… And now, it doesn’t matter as much because your SALT deductions are limited. I didn’t even both to itemize last year.
The standard deduction was a better option for me, and since I intentionally did very little donations, there wasn’t much worth itemizing.[/quote]

Right, now it doesn’t matter. Maybe this is the year to go back to a normal schedule of paying property tax.
And the mortgage deduction isn’t worth as much to most filers – except for those well above standard deduction.

I hope our gains will be enough to make a difference when it comes time to pay the piper-will that day ever come? Yes I know worrying about debt levels has become old fashioned…

[quote=The-Shoveler]LOL so do you seriously think we will ever pay it off at this point? (the national debt).

One day some president will just order the treasury to mint a bunch of trillion dollar coins and use those to pay it off and I predict “nothing will happen”, we will just go on like it never happened.

anyway IMO.[/quote]

I don’t think we will ever need to worry about our debt as long as we have a large nuclear weapons arsenal and a large and modern military. About 30 years ago, I was asked to write an essay that could either compare or contrast the fall of Rome with the potential fall of the US. Some of those social studies teachers strongly encouraged us to write these comparions (or to give reasons why we were different from Rome) Many made the dire prediction we wouldn’t be around 20-30 years from now or a major player in the world… I took the easy A and compared how US was like Rome since it’s always easier to be negative and critical of everything that isn’t working or failing versus actually thinking about the positive things this country uniquely offers.

Fast forward 30 years. We are still around, our influence hasn’t really changed that much, and yes, my own kid middle school has the same exact assignment, where begrudgingly my kid also took the easy A route and wrote about how similar we are to Rome and we will fail 30 years from now, not really believing it….

Lol. Thank God I didn’t make any financial decisions based on this sort of gloom and doom misery. In fact, quite the opposite. I thought most american educators were full of it, couldn’t manage their own personal finance and could hardly be a role model for anything money related, and started trading stocks when I was 17-18….

So yeah , lol. America’s death and demise has been long predicted a long time ago. Chances are, it won’t happen in our lifetime or our kids lifetime. For every person wallowing in misery here, there is probably someone else that is doing just fine.