Claire31

Also thank you Michael that web address was soo helpful. When you buy a property how do you know what school you can send your kids to

Michael

If you click on the symbol, usually it will point you to the web site of the school district and there will likely be area maps that will indicated which school your child will attend. So you look at the area maps and find your address in one of the area maps and that area map indicates the school that your child will attend. If you are looking at being at that address from K-12, look for the possibly different area maps for elementary, middle, and high school to see which schools your child will attend through all those years.

Havnfun

Yes that would be a more realistic budget.

Nora77

all the best in the world comes from cali...

GT bike frames, Guns n Roses, and porn industry.

Michael

Also to understand California property taxes, Prop 13 limits property taxes to a 1% plus 0.25% for local bond debt on the value of the home when purchased. Therefore usually most counties/cities will assess the value of your home at the purchase price and subtract the homestead allowance to determine the taxable value. Most of the property taxes are to pay for schools. Only if you live in Beverly Hills or some other very exclusive area, the city is not going to need $50,000 or more per home to pay for their schools and therefore the mill rate may be below 1%. However more normal communities usually have a mill rate of 1% plus some bond percentage as property taxes. The cities of Palo Alto (affluent upper middle class city in the bay area) does have a 1% plus mill rate but they also spend about $18,000 per student as compared to maybe $8,000 per student for the poorer school districts (including a large amount of money from the state and federal government).

The amount of subsidy from the state and federal governments depends primarily on the wealth of the schools district. Therefore Palo Alto gets very little government money but Oakland may get a lot of government money. Most of the money that Palo Alto gets from the federal and state governments are for special needs programs.

Due to Prop 13, the accessed value of your home can't be increased by more than 2% per year so therefore, the longer you lived in a home and if home values rise more than 2% per year, you will get more of a property tax break than new buyers. If house prices drop, you can get the assessed value reduced.

SanDiegogirl

Once you know roughly which areas you would like to live in, go onto a Website like Zillow.com and find out how much homes for sale are being listed for.

That will give you a much more realistic idea of what is available in your price range.

Claire31

Thank you for all the advice. Do any of you know anything about buying foreclosure properties and what are the pros and cons etc

Bob

There was a thread on foreclosures at the beginning of the summer, different state I think, but the gist of the info should still be good if you can find it.

Alan17

One of the biggest cons is right now there aren't that many of them. A couple of years ago there were, but it's a sellers market. Any short sales or foreclosures we saw when we were looking last year were snapped up by investors. The process was also long - one place was on the market for over a year because the three lenders couldn't agree on how to split whatever cash they could get - despite it being a nice place in a great area.

We ended up buying a regular sale earlier this year. Gave up looking at shorts/foreclosures.

Michael

Investors also have the cash (sometimes 100% down) in the current market to get the best deals. My son had to bid against investors in LA about 8 months ago and it wasn't a pleasant experience.