Can I get my property taxes lowered?
There is no relationship between the government appraisal and the mortgage appraisal.  The loan appraisal is done by a lender to determine if the property value is in agreement with the loan amount. The government appraisal is done to determine how much to charge you in taxes. They use the values of residences and commercial property to get their operating budget each year. They also set the rate to generate the amount of income money they need. If they cut all appraisals in half, they would just double the rate. In some jurisdictions the government appraises every year, in other places every three years. Some only when the property is sold. In some jurisdictions the maximum increase or decrease in government appraisal is set by law. But then they reset after the house is sold. That being said. Use this time to review the appraisal from the government. They may have facts wrong. They may think you have a pool, or more bedrooms or a garage, when you don't. Some jurisdictions use an automated process, others do a more detailed/individual process. If there was a mistake ten years ago with the description it will never get caught unless you complain.  Check with the governemnt website for how to appeal. Some have windows of opportunity for an appeal. "You most definitely can appeal the county's appraisal of your property.  How to do so, and your odds of success will vary widely by your location, but I have successfully appealed the valuation on one of my rental properties. I asked my realtor to provide me with recent sales of comparable homes in the neighborhood & provided them along with my appeal as evidence of what I felt a reasonable valuation should be.  One of three things will happen: 1) Your appeal will be accepted, 2) It will be denied, or 3) you will be asked to come in & plea your case in front of the county assessor. In my case, the county accepted my appeal without needing to testify. Look around your county assessor's website ... you will probably be able to find the form necessary for filing an appeal.  If not, give them a call & they'll tell you the procedure. The county generally uses a simplistic statistical model to do their valuations. Little to no human time is spent reviewing your home's value, so it's quite possible for their valuation to be unreasonable.   An appeal can take a bit of time & paperwork, but can definitely be worth the effort if the county's valuation is way off. Hope this helps! @mhoran_psprep Your point is well taken that in practice the relationship between sales prices & tax assessments is a bit more tenuous. The waters get muddy when property values have a large swing (like the past 5 years). When tax assessor's started seeing large drops in property values during the recession (and consequent drops in their budgets), I'm sure there was considerable pressure to prevent wholesale decreases in tax valuations. It's politically easier to ""prop-up"" falling valuations than to raise tax rates.  However, the fact remains that the models that assessors use in determining property values are based on sales history - thus, I believe (and have found) that recent sales can be a persuasive piece of evidence in a property tax assessment appeal." The question is whether the assessment is in line with surrounding homes. If my 1500 sq ft house on 1/4 acre is assessed far higher than a similar sized house/land nearby, I'd have a case. +/- 10% can be for age/quality, but 25% or more, I'd investigate. mhoran is right, values for different purposes need not align. A start would be to use a service like Zillow which offers property tax information, as well as house sizes. Let us know what you discover. Welcome to Money.SE
You can reduce your capital gains taxes in two ways (USA), off the top of my head: You bought a rental property in 2001. Hopefully you paid fair value else other issues come into play.  Say you paid $120K. You said you have been taking depreciation, which for residential real estate is taken over 27.5 years, so you are about halfway through. Since you don't depreciate land, you may have taken a total $50K so far.  With no improvements, and no transaction costs, you have $50K in depreciation recapture, taxed at a maximum 25% (or your lower, marginal rate) and a cap gain of the 5-10K you mentioned. Either can be offset by losses you've been carrying forward if you suffered large stock losses at some point. You've just pushed the problem off to trying to figure out the market value of property, not to mention that property values are subject to bubbles. I don't particularly worry about the problems that would cause the government, but it makes it really hard on businesses (and people) that now have to pay a lot more than they budgeted for.   Property taxes are a useful thing, and serve an important purpose, but you don't want to bet budgets on them alone. Diversification is important in all kinds of investments. It’s actually become a problem.  To raise taxes above that threshold requires a public vote.  My city just raised them with a referendum for the schools.  It’s pretty difficult though, and it definitely forces legislators to need the money for something voters want. This doesn't sound very legal to me. Real estate losses cannot generally be deducted unless you have other real estate income. So the only case when this would work is when that person has bunch of other buildings that do produce income, and he reduces that income, for tax purposes, by deducting the expenses/depreciation/taxes for the buildings that do not. However, depreciation doesn't really reduce taxes, only defers them to the sale. As mhoran_psprep said - all the rest of the expenses will be minimal. Kentucky property tax is assessed as of the owner on January 1 of each calendar year.  In April you should be notified of what KY considers you to owe them, and you have a two week period in May to appeal those decisions (though it appears that you can only appeal Real property tax assessments).  The final tax bill is then sent to you in the fall, by October, and you have until the end of the year to pay the bill. See Kentucky Property Tax Calendar Overview for more details. Thus, if you owned the car on Jan 1 2016, then you should owe personal property tax on it for 2016 due in the fall.  You may not have owed the tax paid in November, if it was indeed personal property tax, unless the seller was asking you to recompense them for the tax they paid in 2015. Note that property tax is separate and distinct from usage tax, the 6% tax for vehicles paid at purchase date (once and only once). "Our current economic situation is a mess, and our current tax system is the problem, but the problem is too little wealth taxation, not too much.    You are correct in asserting that land value tax is not the solution, since we don't live in a society where farmland is the primary source of ownership-based income.  If you want to look at what you can own to earn money these days, look at the holdings of Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Exxon-Mobile, Verizon, etc. It's not farmland anymore, it's IP, and it goes entirely untaxed.  Taxing property is completely appropriate but the problem is that we live in a world where the taxes, even taxes designed to tax wealth like property taxes, fall almost entirely on the individual, since high value capital can move jurisdictions to dodge taxes and thus taxing wealth like we should creates a competitive disadvantage.    When you push back on real estate property taxes you don't make things better for most people.  Property values rise (since the value of an asset is proportional to how much money it can earn for it's owner) driving affordability down, rent up, homeownership rates down and generally worsening the quality of life for everyone.  Pushed to the extreme, you get a 2 class system, where land ownership is for the entitled, and everyone else are worthless.  History is littered with examples, which is why we know the word ""serf"".  For a modern day cautionary tale, look at what happened in California since the Reagan property tax changes.  They still seem convinced it was a great change, but the California real estate market is pure insanity." "If you have a huge disparity in incomes, ""maybe"".   If you make roughly in the same ballpark, **Noooooo!**   The ability to file separately and have one partner (the higher earner) itemize and claim all the home-related deductions while the other takes the standard deduction is one of the greatest (middle-class) loopholes in modern tax law.  When married, even if filing separately, you have to both itemize or both take the standard deduction.   You just need to take care that the person itemizing has provably contributed *at least* the amount they claim toward the house.  So have one of you write the checks for the mortgage and property tax, and the other pay for everything else, and it'll probably come out roughly even over time.  Going back to my first line, the US tax code seems to be designed around the stereotypical Donna Reed 1950s household, with a single earner.  The closer you are to equal, the bigger the marriage tax **penalty** gets." If you ever own a home (which sounds doubtful), or your parents sell their home after 20 years of ownership,  you will appreciate those capital gains taxes.   They don't just apply to the rich.     Now go,  shoo, scram.... back to your dorm room, you filthy college freshman. Something like this sort of thing happened to me but with Chase bank.  The county made a mistake on our taxes and forgot to give us the right deductions and we got a whopping high property tax bill. Since we did have an escrow account the bank just paid the taxes and raised our mortgage by a nearly unaffordable 60% or so even though we called the bank and told them not to pay the tax bill as it was being disputed. By the time we got the tax issues sorted out Chase refused to adjust the mortgage. The only way we were able to get out of it was to refinance with another bank and opt out of the escrow account and handle taxes on our own,  which fixed the whole problem. It seemed an awful lot like an attempt to force us into a foreclosure. If we didn't have the money to refinance we would have barely been able to afford the mortgage payment.  Why they would want to do that I have no idea. It really sucked though. The terms of most mortgages usually include the requirement for tax escrow. Some banks will let you handle your own taxes once you loan to value drops below 50%. It's annoying that you lose the use of your own funds, I agree. It can't hurt to write a note to the bank and see it they'll waive escrow. Ok, have your father 'sell' you the house with a RECORDED land contract for x dollars and a gift of equity(GOE) of y.  He writes of the max he can each year for the GOE (ask a tax attorney on this one), and your cousin lends him the money for his FL prop.  Consult a tax attorney on the capital gains, but you can write off the actualized gains at sale if you LIVED in the prop for 2 of the last 5 or 7 years (I can't remember) and were on title.    Years later, you use the recorded land contract, with the verifiable on time payments you've been making, to a conforming lender and do a R&T refi. "You can get a ""drive-by"" appraisal or an assessment from a local real estate agent. This obviously will give you a less precise and not as reliable information as a full appraisal, but will be significantly cheaper." You Americans have got to start understanding that tax is NOT theft. And while I applaud the notion of never increasing taxes at a rate higher than inflation, the idea of reducing park maintenance so that rich residents don't have to face a very slightly higher rates bill is an effective demonstration of what's wrong in America today.  It's not just about YOU. You are a member of a community, and you must contribute to that community in whatever portion is required in order to assure the smooth running of the community.  And the lovely thing is, if you don't like the way it's being run, you can get yourself elected, *and change it*. &gt;All tax is income tax, as if you haven't got the income, you can't pay it.    This is a pretty apt simplification. I find that most land value tax advocates are either trying to engineer the demographics of property ownership or spiteful against people who own more than they themselves do.