So after whining about my Property Taxes, I think I have come up with a simple(r) model for Property Tax valuations which could make lives simpler (simpler for me).
Simply put, your Property Tax is set when you buy your house. When the price is set, that is what your property taxes will be based on, until the house is sold again.
Sounds easy doesn’t it? The municipalities could tweak it so that they could add an inflationary increase each year, so that their incomes could slowly increase, and maybe a caveat on the valuation at sale (i.e. the City can have an independent body valuate the house at sale time and then base property taxes on that value), in case folks try to sell houses for $1 or the like.
Opinions? Should I write this one up and present it to the Ottawa City Council as a progressive and exciting way to move forward in the 21st century? Maybe if I add a Green element to it, it might be an easier sell (it will help the environment, because it will slow housing developments)?
This time of year is magical in terms of the sheer volume of money that seems to go for taxes in my household.
First we have the CRA and Income Tax coming due in April, which causes lots of excitement as I mentioned in How Do You Dor Your Taxes?, and I am happy to say that this portion of the Magical Tax Mystery Tour is over, with my E-filing this past weekend. I like to get those in early, especially when the government owes me money (and even if you owe them money, you don’t have to pay until the last possible day).
The second exciting part of this Tax Trek is Property Taxes that I owe to the City of Ottawa. Ottawa’s system has a couple of ways you can pay and I choose to make the two payments they ask for in March and May (you can pay monthly if you wish as well), and this makes for the right hook portion of the tax combination punch I receive this time of year.
Property taxes have continually gone up since I started owning a house about 13 years ago, as various levels of Government off-load their own service load and down load them to the municipal governments, but also the City of Ottawa is an interesting story all on it’s own with Amalgamation and the fact that the City of Ottawa keeps growing (and thus it’s thirst for Tax Funds is never quite satiated).
Given I seem to live in my finances in this time of year, I always end up noticing interesting points that these taxes bring into focus for me:
I don’t think there is anything too deep in those points, just some stuff I noticed about my property tax bill.
As you can tell, I use QuickTax to do my tax returns and those of my direct family. I find it a useful tool, but my bet is other software solutions might work just as well, but I am comfortable with this tool, so I keep using it (I am a creature of habit).
Typically I do my taxes over about a 1.5 month period, while the various tax receipts and such arrive at my house. Typically the methodology followed would be something like:
With that, I await to see whether I forgot something (inevitably a receipt will appear near the end of March, which I have forgotten about), or whether I made an incorrect assumption, when the CRA sends me their response to my submission. Most years it has been spot on, which makes me very happy.
Anybody else do their taxes this way? Did I miss something?
It is time for the first major give-away on this site (ever).
Intuit was kind enough to contact me and send me 2 copies of QuickTax Standard, which I will gladly give away (since I already bought a copy for myself before they sent me these (yes, irony is a good friend of mine)).
Legalities: Please note, I do use Quicktax (and Quicken) but the copies I have I paid for with my own money (more fool me), I think these are useful tools, but I am not being directly paid to run this give-away (in fact I am out of pocket because I have to ship it to you). I do run advertising for Intuit to sell Quicktax, as you have seen over the past few weeks, but this give-away is not connected to those ads.
How can you win one of these free copies? Well, let’s first start out with some of the ground rules:
Contest will close on Tuesday February 23rd at Midnight.
A preliminary report from the City of Ottawa garbage folks has floated the idea of removing the Garbage Collection portion of the City Taxes and turn it into a user fee. With this move City Taxes will drop by $86 which sounds like a nice idea, however, the User Fee for Garbage is slated to be $195 per household which is about a 115% increase in the cost of paying for Garbage in Ottawa.
How is this possible? Let’s look a little closer:
Now that is an expensive program. If you are a rural Ottawa person you won’t have to pay for the Green Bins, since you won’t have them, but you’ll still have your garbage fee go up by around 50%.
My suspicion is that garbage collection will become more like water and sewers and will become a bi-monthly billed program, which will then spiral in price to match the cost of garbage collection.
Do I have any other options here? No, I can’t opt out, I can’t claim I don’t use the service, so I must pay, as must my neighbours.
Care to complain? November 10th is your day. Read the briefing notes, very interesting accounting discussions there.
For those with any UK heritage it is, in fact, Guy Fawkes day today. Hopefully there aren’t any more gunpowder plots out there!