Real Estate
How to Find a Low-Tax Place to Retire
By Emily Brandon
Retirement should be less taxing than working. And it can be, if you seek out a state with lower taxes than the place you live now. State and local taxes vary considerably by location. Here are the major taxes and tax breaks you should take into account when deciding where to retire:
Social Security. Most states no longer tax Social Security benefits. Some 35 states don't require residents to pay Read more...
10 Cities for Retirement Property Steals
By Luke Mullins
Although the financial crisis has hammered retirement accounts,
it has also converted a number of popular retirement destinations into bargains for home buyers. Indeed, the very states that took the brunt of the housing bust—like Florida, California, Nevada, and Arizona—also contain some of the nation's most enviable markets in which to retire. This development has handed today's seniors a chance to scoop up properties in many top-notch retirement spots at attractive prices.
To get a sense of which retirement markets offer the most compelling valuations, we obtained price-to-income data for 384 metropolitan statistical areas from Moody's Analytics. The price-to-income ratio—a key yardstick of housing affordability—expresses the relationship between home values and earnings. For example Read more...
Can Government Make More Loan Modifications Ahead of the Next Foreclosure Wave?
The $75 billion Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP), a creation of the Obama administration, has aimed to lower the monthly payments
of struggling homeowners in order to save the country from more massive foreclosure rates. Unfortunately, the consensus so far is that it has not been terribly effective; only 110,000 homeowners have seen their trial modifications made permanent, meaning the majority of the program participants are still in danger of reverting back into default.
Now millions more foreclosures are being forecasted for 2010 as certain types of exotic loan rates are poised to reset this year. HAMP was originally designed to Read more...