Every country pretty much. Lawsuit. Don’t pay taxes. Owe money to someone personally. You don’t get to hide your assets behind a home and get into financial trouble in other areas.
This is also why homeowners typically live within the law. Too much to loose.
Setting aside all the legal reason people have outlined its important to rmeber this is America.
If a rich enough person wants you dead they’ll shoot you in the head on the front porch of your home in broad daylight in front of your neighbors and then the cops will say no crime happened and the news will say that person always lived there.
Rich people can and do act however they want without consequences and our entire judicial system is just set up as a smokescreen to point to to tell poor people that isn’t the case.
Nothing at all bad happened to the two German journalists who published the Panama Papers. Bastian Obermayer and Frederik Obermaier are both very much alive and well, and have started a nonprofit organization in honor of their friend and colleague, Daphne Caruana Galizia, who was murdered by an operative of the Maltese government officials who she was investigating for corruption that was revealed in the Panama Papers.
The investigations and revelations produced by The Daphne Project are ongoing. These are journalists who refuse to be silenced by one woman’s murder.
But to understand that, you’d have to be interested in not being ignorant for five seconds instead of just parroting things you saw online because you think it makes you sound smart.
Oh, also if you’re under investigation for anything, the cops can just confiscate your house, car, possessions, whatever. Even if you’re found not guilty, you don’t get anything they took back. Typically it will get sold at a discount, typically to a cop. You’ll often see them on twitter taking pictures with their fancy new car that they dragged someone out of a month ago. It’s called asset forfeiture, and iirc It’s the second or third most prevalent from of theft in America, wage theft being the first.
A common way that I don’t see mentioned here is that it is common to take out a loan using your home as collateral, something like a major business loan not panning out or a mismanaged personal loan can absolutely end up letting the bank seize your house to pay off the loan.
Absolutely. You have to pay taxes on your property (in most states; there may be exceptions that I’m not aware of). If you don’t pay your taxes for a long enough period of time, your property will be seized and auctioned off. Starting bids on property auctions are usually the back taxes; in less desirable areas–such as undeveloped land that with no utilities that’s out in the middle of nowhere–that may be all it costs.
One thing to keep in mind is that in the US, there’s very few people or companies that actually own the land that they’re on. Most of the time you have the rights to use the land for certain types of things, but not actually own it. The US government (federal on down) has various ways of seizing property for its own purposes.
There’s only a handful of people who actually own the land they live on. Most of them were granted the land by prior governments (mostly Spain) before the US was a country. Their ownership was grandfathered in and has passed via inheritance through the families. Several of those family plots are in Texas and Florida. Everyone else is just allowed to stay as long as they play ball with the rules.
To certain extents, I think the government has rights of expropriation of land in other countries too. Sometimes you can sue the government for it too. It’s a messy biz.
??? Damn that’s the first I’ve heard of that. I wonder if that’s so the government could justify pushing around native american revervations, or taking places like Hawai’i into the States? I can’t imagine many Countries would willingly allow the US govt to just take their shit
They aren’t saying the us government can take land in like France whenever. But like Canada has expropriation laws available where if needed Canadian land can be seized from the land owner, usually with compensation.
This is often done for things like infrastructure, highways and such. Turns it from needing the owner to be willing to sell into “we are buying this land now, heres what we think the land was worth”
Eminent Domain, I think it’s called. I know around the DC area, a lot of people lost houses, businesses, and properties to make way for more highways in the last 50 years.
Yes. It happened to my friends. They both lost their jobs and couldn’t pay the property tax on their fully paid-off house, so it was foreclosed and auctioned off.
Depends on where you live. Here in Washington state we don’t have an income tax, so our property taxes are one of the few ways the government has to collect taxes. For that reason our property taxes are much higher than states that have multiple ways to collect.
The property tax is based on the assessed value of the property. (Which can change over time, even if you bought it years ago.) And the tax ranges from 0.28% in Hawaii up to 2.49% in New Jersey. Most states are around 1%. There may also be local taxes from a county or city, which is typically a small fraction of the above.
This is Texas which has no income tax, so they have high property tax. It’s about 1% per annum based on the appraised value of the property. Plus if it’s a newer neighborhood, you pay an extra amount for the cost of infrastructure until it’s paid off, usually called a MUD (municipal utility district) tax. Mine is an extra 1.2% so I’m paying roughly $1200/month in property taxes for my residence.
Americans ultimately do pay a lot of taxes in the end. It does towards all sorts of stuff at multiple levels but the greatest impact on individual lives is at the state level.
1% is a pretty normal amount for an urban area, but it’s usually a combination of county and city. If the state of Texas has a 1% tax on top of county and city taxes, that’d be pretty high.
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