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Right Angle

Bleeding Blue

There’s more than just money at stake in this Migration from the Madness.

Who could put a dollar value on a human life? Well, Steve Green could, of course, as he cracks out the statistics on the financial cost to the top five blue states as more and more people make a wild dash for the freedom and sanity of the red ones. And as Bill points out, there’s more than just money at stake in this Migration from the Madness. 

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28 replies on “Bleeding Blue”

California should have failed two years ago. I have been waiting for the Constitutional crisis that would have forced us to deal with the inevitable question of what to do with failed democrat states. Unfortunately, the stupid bipartisan covid bailouts completely (and doubtlessly intentionally) stopped that necessary event from happening. CA was given something like 160 billion dollars which Newsom spread around and which he used to be able to dishonestly claim that he had caused a surplus in California due to his great management of the state. Ugh. Of course there was no surplus, and he has run out of that free money and we are looking at a more than 30 billion dollar deficit within two years of receiving such a huge sum.
This has enabled Newsom to ridiculously run around claiming to be a greater governor than, say, DeSantis, and the logical savior to run as president after Biden. It’s so stupid it really boggles my mind just how dumb the average Democrat voter is to not see through it.
Since this kind of bailout is the only way that the Dems in this one-party state can claim to be anything but “death, the destroyer of worlds”, you can count on another “crisis” that forces another bailout of blue states so that nobody stops and says “Hey! Why should Red states have to have their surpluses taken to bail out stupid blue states? How is that constitutional?”
It is essential that that reckoning comes before it is too late. I don’t think that the republican party (or the ‘populist conservative’ movement) has the will to force when it comes down to it.
[P.S. Bill, Stephen and Scott – I think THIS would make a great discussion on its own!]

California and Florida/Texas are getting the governments they deserve.

I escaped from the Soviet Socialist Repooblik of Kalifornia ten years ago. I wasn’t a native Kalifornian and grew up in real America. There has been no one instance in my life that was both the relief and triumph that equalled seeing the “Welcome to California” sign receding in the rear view mirror on the other side of I-10 for the very last time.

If you have never lived in California you might think I’m exaggerating a bit. I’m not. All the times I returned from overseas to stand once again on American soil generated the same feeling but to a lesser degree.

All those times I knew I was coming back home from a lesser, worse place. Even coming back from relatively decent places like Britain, France, Germany, Italy or Australia I was always happy and relieved to set foot in the U.S. again. I always knew America was there somewhere on the globe to return to if I survived.

In the course of my life it became unavoidable to move to California. It wasn’t terribly bad when I first got there but over the 15 years I spent in California the decline was first gradual and then became outright undeniable.

The problem is that California is a state in the United States of America. I was ‘home’ but witnessing the same political and social horrors I had seen in various places elsewhere on the globe. The decline into Third World living was so precipitous it was astounding.

I went from the minor irritation of indifference to California weirdness to a complete and utter hatred for that place.

The one thing about being a member here on BillWhittle.com that I dislike is knowing that a tiny percentage of my tiny membership fees goes to Bill who then must pay taxes to California from his income, his purchases, and every other financial transaction he makes in that state.

I can live with that if I have to. Bill’s living with it and …

He doesn’t have to. Life is short, too short to waste it on one minute of putting up with the Soviet Socialist Repooblik of Kalifornia longer than can be avoided.

LIfe is just better almost anywhere else in the U.S. The living expenses are cheaper too. Bill ol’ buddy, you really need to get out of there for your own sake.

I moved to a mid-Atlantic state that still is not as red as I’d prefer it to be but it’s orders of magnitude better than Kalifornia. We have four mild seasons with about a month of uncomfortable heat in the summer and a month of low but rarely freezing temperatures in the winter. We didn’t get a single snowflake last year though there are years when it does snow. Even then, even when we have what’s locally considered a major snow event, the snow rarely lasts on the ground more than a few days and never more than a week.

Being originally from Minnesota the climate here is quite similar with the exception that we don’t get a real winter. To me we never get past early Autumn between summer and spring. I love it and the icing on the cake is prodding Southern Winter Grumps about their sissy-assed winters.

There are places where life is a lot better than in Kalifornia. They might not be the bright Red State you’d prefer but even so the living here and in such places is so much better that I go to bed every night and thank God I don’t live in Kalifornia anymore.

After spending my formative years in NYC area, I left for that same mid-Atlantic state and, except for a couple of brief forays elsewhere including upstate NY (not the same as NYC or Albany) I have lived here. Almost 2/3 of my life is here to the point where I don’t consider myself a New Yorker anymore (people who grew up here still do đŸ˜‰ )
I had actually left long before Rudy cleaned the place up. And I gladly took my wife and daughter to that NYC.
Now, I cannot think of a reason to go and visit.
It is a climate issue, just not the weather type of climate.
There was a time that I could look past the deterioration of the city in order to enjoy some of what it had to offer.
No longer. The city is not a welcoming place. It is not inviting in any manner.
I agree that Bill needs to get out. Frankly the Gulf Coast from FL to AL has some nice places, but I had thought he might follow Jeremy and Ben to Nashville. Just economically they’d have a much better quality of life and within a day’s drive of Nashville is an incredibly diverse number of cities and towns. If we were starting over again, that might be the place we settled.
I (sort of) understand why he stays; but as I stated, climate is more than weather.

We came at the same problem from opposite coasts and ended up in the same State. Which speaks well for where you and I live now.

There’s also a thing about non-red states. Those states, unlike Kalifornia, are mostly blue only in the very large cities. The rest of the state is Red as red can be. Even if I don’t get the State politics I would prefer, I live in and reap the benefits from a Red State population surrounding me. Which is in turn surrounded by an ever decreasing Blue tint.

Our governor reached a record high approval rating just a few days ago. 57% of our fellow residents think he’s doing a great job. That trend upwards appears to be a continuing situation if you look at his historic poll numbers as Governor.

There’s a vital lesson to be learned here, several probably. Two that come to mind immediately …

  1. Despite what old guard Conservatives (I’m more one of those than not) think, populism and cultural distinctions are vote getters.
  2. If our governor can do this here, it can be done in other Blue States too.

Some day, maybe in our lifetimes, there will be an American political world without Donald Trump in it, or at least not dominating it. Our governor is a prime and vital example of what must come if we want to take this nation back from the nihilist losers bent on its destruction.

The Democrat Left can only buy so many votes before they run out of money and their system collapses. As life gets better in the U.S., and it has been slowly doing so except in exemplary crap-holes like Kalifornia and NYC, they’re going to run out of actual victims that they can buy votes from for political power.

The Democrats have abandoned their traditional base, the blue collar working people, for ever more sensational “victims”. What they’re doing politically is living off a diet of candy and ice cream without eating any meat or vegetables. The sugar rush on a diet like that is wild and erratic but the crash is inevitable. You can only eat that way for so long before it kills you. The Democrats can only live off of woke candy until people wake up and see their education, work and future getting where a heart attack is unavoidable.

Personally, I hope they keep up this trend they’ve established. The sooner it goes “BOOM!” the sooner both parties will get back to our real base of American Exceptionalism. I have no problem at all with laughing at them as they clutch their political chests in agony and collapse.

You’ll know it’s happening when you see the Rainbow flags quietly come down off of Embassies and other government buildings. That will be the sign that the Democrat Left is choking on cotton candy.

To both of you, “ACTS” and “Ron”,
I hear you. And in particular to ACTS, as a native Californian and a lifelong resident of the bluest of the blue counties in California – Santa Cruz – I too have watched the decline of parts of the state. San Francisco, Oakland, L.A. Basin, Sacramento and all the major cities of the central valley. It’s bad. Yet, the Zuckerbergs, the Ellisons, and all the Google and Apple millionaires continue to gobble up the properties in Santa Cruz to live in. Why? Because it’s beautiful, warm not hot, cool not freezing, small but not tiny, close to major airports, Monterey Peninsula Golf, the Monterey Bay, beaches, redwoods, Stanford and UCSF hospitals.
The tech giants are pushing the middle class out the county I grew up in and have resided in for 63 years. A part of me bristles about leaving, and letting these D-bags “win”. F those guys I keep saying.
I’ve travelled and worked in other parts of this amazing country. There are lots of beautiful places. Hell, even northern Wisconsin is beautiful 6 weeks out of the year. 3 seasons there. Mosquito, Ice, Mud. Teton Valley of Idaho is amazing. Maybe St. George Utah. Flagstaff AZ. Monument Colorado looks nice too, but a few of the neighbors might be a bit nutz.
But Portland? Seattle? KC or STL? No way.
My kids are here. My extended family is here. I have a home here.
My wife and I agree. Reparations will make us leave. As in, at once , and I’ll find the wealthiest Google billionaire and gouge the hell out of him/her/he/she/it and take the money and run. Plenty of room on a few acres in Idaho to bring my adult offspring along if they want.
But until then, I’ll keep the fight up here. F those guys.

I hear you and understand completely. In my view family comes second only to God and well before politics.

I was very fortunate in that a “perfect storm” of circumstances all came together at roughly the same time so when I saw my opportunity I pulled the trigger without hesitation.

I convinced my little sister, my only sibling and closest relative, to make the move the same time as I did. They bought property here and came the year after I got here. I maintained their property for them until they could make the move.

They’re no slouches financially but at some point during this process we were all out of cash and living on credit cards. That resolved itself a few years back, like 7 or so, when they sold their California property and paid off the property they own here, with a nice chunk of change to boot.

Things have been well every since.

The argument that made my sister decide to move out of California had to do with the impact on her only child*. Her son.

We have a cousin living in CA that had two boys. The cousin was the youngest daughter of my wealthy uncle who also lived in CA. The eldest boy stripped his gears on inhalants, which he used when he had no money for real drugs. He’s now institutionalized. The younger son literally drank himself to death.

Understand, those two boys had every advantage. Love and financial support that I can only wish I’d had available to me at that age. They turned out badly even so and were heartbreaking losses to the entire family.

I pointed at them and said “Is that what you want for your kid? Look at what those two boys had going for them and then look at what their peers and the lifestyle they had in California did to them! Your kid might or might not end up like them but that’s not totally in your control, is it? If that were something that could have been prevented then prevention and all the subsequent interventions would have made all the difference. It did not and that’s because of circumstances beyond control of their family. You need to think about how close your boy is to the things that screwed those two boys up beyond all hope.”

Rarely a week goes by that we don’t hear about some further insanity in CA and say to each other “We got out of there just in time. I’m so glad we don’t live there anymore!”

My point is that we had the means and the resources to do what’s best for the family. The only part of our family that we could make decisions about.

Take that into account too. I don’t know your circumstances so I can’t give you any useful advice. All I can do is tell you how things went for me/us.

(*That kid is graduating college this year. He is already working at his first job that he landed due to his studies and got hired on the first job interview he’d ever been to as an adult. Proud of that boy, happy as hell things worked out for him this way and not the way my cousin’s sons went.)

As Bill would say, “Good on you, ACTS” for suggesting to little sis to, as We say in this part of California, “Salsipuedes”. And good on that kid and his first job! Good Mom, Good Dad (assuming) and good Uncle.
and your recounting the horrible experience for one side of your family, I’ll recount my last post.
Good Parent (s) + Good Schools = Still Possibly Crappy outcomes.
Among the key things I taught my children when they were young, “pick your friends wisely. Bad friend choices can undo every good thing you’ve ever learned from me.”

Excellent tale. I recall several years back, maybe soph year of college when Ronette told me she wouldn’t be living in our little burg. I told her, you may not live here, but I bet you end up living someplace like it. Small towns are better. She knew my history and how I ended up in what is essentially a large Mayberry.
A while back she decided she wanted to try a larger burg, so she went to Raleigh to seek he way.
Came back and his now about to start teaching at the same HS she attended.
And she is much happier.
We all have to learn our own way. Hopefully she will be the kind of teacher that our Gov is trying to get.
On that subject, the timing of Gov terms and the no consecutive terms really prevents our Govs from seeking POTUS without being a Senator first.
Maybe he can get Hillary’s idiot out in a couple of years.

My nephew is going through the same process as Ronette. He was born and raised in Los Angeles right up to the point where he moved here.

He complained there was ‘nothing to do here” because in L.A. he and his parents had a season pass to Disneyland and often went to things like Legoland, Knott’s Berry Farm, Universal studios, etc. All of which are very expensive, none of which he had to pay a dime for.

His parents could afford these things but they did them because all of those were comparatively safe places in a sea of crime and violence. Disneyland is particularly safe, they have world class security which you seldom would notice unless you knew what to look for.

He lived in a relatively good part of San Pedro in L.A. County but wasn’t allowed to play outside unsupervised for obvious reasons. That meant he always had an adult “playmate” when he was outside. He didn’t see the crime and danger because his parents stayed away from circumstances where that would be an issue. Which became increasingly more difficult and more restrictive.

So not only was he a bit spoiled, he was unaware of the really nasty things going on around him.

I kept a subscription to a crime reporting website and on any given month there were upwards of 500 crimes within a two mile radius of where we lived. About a third of them were violent crimes. And we lived in a ‘good’ part of L.A. It was only a matter of time and odds running out before one of us were cited in those statistics.

We moved here and that same crime report rarely shows any crime at all in a two mile radius of where we live. When it does it’s usually someone who kited a check, got in a fight with someone else they know, or things like mailbox vandalism.

So my nephew is still working through the process of appreciating the lifestyle differences between a semi-rural life and a craphole like Los Angeles.

The crime and violence thing has already hit his family hard. Before he was born his father’s brother, so his uncle, was killed on the streets of NYC. Stabbed to death for the change in his pocket. He bled out on a sidewalk and no one even attempted to render any aid.

That kind of thing seems very abstract and unreal to someone that young so he’s learning his lessons right now.

Funny thing … He hated going to school in L.A. County. He liked school, it was the ‘inmates’ that were the problem. He didn’t dare use the restroom* all day because Hispanic and black kids had ‘staked out’ their territories there and would mug anyone who wasn’t a member of their gang who tried to use the facilities. One of his buddies couldn’t hold it and had to use the can during school hours. He got a broken arm and lost his sneakers for doing that. In middle school.

So when my sister would pick him up every day the first thing they did was make a flying trip to my aunt and uncle’s house (same uncle mentioned above) which was closer to the school than home. So he could go pee.

I overheard him bragging to one of his friends here about how much cool stuff there was in Los Angeles to do. I pointed out that even though it was fabulously expensive he had never paid for any of that and asked …

“When was the last time you got mugged in a restroom here? When was the last time you went all day without using the restroom because you knew you’d get mugged if you did?”

(*I’m always hyper-aware of everything going on around me when I use any public restroom anywhere. You are never quite so vulnerable as when you have your fly unzipped and your junk in your hands. I learned that from travel in third world nations. My nephew learned it in middle school in Kalifornia.)

Fully understand where you’re coming from. Worked in Hungry, visited Slovakia, worked in Turkey, Greece, Panama, Columbia, Bolivia, Philippines, Japan, visited China. The worst were the Central and South American countries that had been under dictatorship for decades. Pure abject poverty everywhere you looked. Greece and Turkey were still suffering under deep-seated Ottoman Empire influence, Hungry was doing quite well, but still many signs of USSR influence. Slovakia was worse. Philippines has always had those who have, those who have less, and those who have nothing, but the people seemed to have a “hey, such is my life” attitude, and enjoyed their lives. That may have had a lot to do with so many of the elderly having lived thru the Japanese occupation. In China I lived in Beijing, Xi’an and Shanghai. The show places were great, but, like our own ‘show places’ in NYC, LA, SF and D.C, go a few blocks off the main drag and you see what life there is really like. Japan, of course, was a rose in the rest of the orient.
It was always good to get home again, even tho it is still CA. I’d leave in a second, but daughter has her two in schools, her business set up, wife won’t live without her, and I don’t know how long I’d last without my wifely part.

I love how Bill keeps a mannequin for his Florida cloths.
I just wanted to point out that there was also a Covid related lazy migration. The Tri-Cities in Washington state were once a pocket of sanity thanks to engineers working on the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. But that has been drowned out by Seattle refugees who tracked their Seattle problems with them. So now we have problems with traffic, drugs and, homelessness that were relatively absent before.

When I lived in Oregon the joke was that the I-5 freeway signs at the CA/OR border read as follows:

CA side — Welcome to Oregon!

OR side — Resume deviant behavior.

One YT video I saw about “cities not to live in in Oregon” had Medford as one of them. But they called it Methford. I drove through last year and now I know why. But the contagion hopped across to the border to Yreka, CA along Interstate 5. Holy cow, we stopped to get a burger there, and in trying to find a place to park, we had to go around a block and the homeless encampments full of pasty white zombies was actually frightening. Meth? Fentenyl? Heroin? More like, Yes please, all of them for this crowd. That’s their version of a Happy Meal….. The contagion has spread to Grants Pass, OR and along the coast to Cool Bay down to Brookings. Oregon is lost.

I had this cartoon on my coffee mug in my office at work… used it to great advantage in dealing with co-workers (and bosses) by simply pointing to it whenever applicable (:

I wish the Californians that left for Georgia were conservative, but they’re not. Of course, it’s to be expected, as they came because their jobs in the movie industry led them here. The sheer quantity of movies filmed in this state is insane. Our Governor gave them huge tax break incentives and, voila’, daily giant explosions and gunfire are heard from massive warehouses off Jimmy Carter Blvd and whole towns become extras as zombies.
The influx of monied New Yorkers, etc. into Florida is causing a bad tax issue. One of the ways Florida raises money without aggravating state voters is by raising the tax on people who have second homes in Florida. Those people cannot vote. So, while residents can’t have their property taxes raised more than 3% a year, my beachfront, second home property tax could go up 300% in the next two years. It is nearly matching my mortgage already. (I know, here’s the tiniest violin playing the saddest song.) Who out there budgets their retirement for increases like that? And if I sell, the capital gains taxes sent to those ba*^#*&rds in federal government are crazy.

Actually the tax situation in Florida sounds ideal to me. Non-voting wealthy people paying taxes so residents don’t have to is a win for Florida voters. Florida is literally selling its mild winter climate at a premium to those who can afford to buy.

I live near the Intercoastal Waterway and see yachts I could never dream to own flowing south in the fall and north in the spring. The rich people who own those vessels hire certified captains to move their yachts back and forth for them. It’s too much bother to do it themselves, they just fly first class from Florida to points north and back again. When they want their yacht in either place it’s parked in a slip waiting for them.

I see no problem with Florida selling its climate in this manner. It’s for sale on the open market to the highest bidders. That’s good, clean, pure capitalism.

That’s not to say I don’t sympathize with you. You appear to have gotten stuck with something you didn’t anticipate and that can happen to anyone.

The solution would have been not to buy a second property in Florida in the first place. That solution is no longer open to you so …

I get the capital gains tax dilemma. The way around that is to sell and reinvest that money immediately in a home somewhere else. If that’s not doable then you have my understanding but not my sympathy. One thing is certain, the situation is going to get worse before it gets better if ever. There is no point in the foreseeable future where it will be any more advantageous to rid yourself of a financial albatross in Florida than soon or now.

Believe it or not, there are people who aren’t rich who made a great real estate decision long ago. My neighbor’s dad bought beachfront on 30-A in a cheaper, non-rental community for $18K back in 1980. He wants to stay, but taxes are too high for him, even as a resident of the state. And capital gains on the sale are maybe 37%, going to the taxman to waste on green energy subsidies and other polluting boondoggles for the Left. The secondary reason I haven’t sold is because I don’t want the government to have that money. (The first is my daughter-in-law might kill me.)

Lol@the daughter-in-law thing …

I’m not criticizing you, I don’t know all of your circumstances.

As I understand it you only pay capital gains if you don’t immediately reinvest the money. A quick glance at the fundamentals of capital gains realized by a real estate sale indicates that you only pay 37% IF that’s the tax bracket you are already in AND you sell the home within a year of its purchase. In which case it’s a short-term capital gain and only taxed as ordinary income. If it’s a long-term gain where the property is held more than one year the capital gains tax is 0%, 15% or 20% depending on which income tax bracket applies to you.

Too, that tax is only assessed on the profit you make, not the entire cash value you received when you sell the property.

I think your 37% claim is a bit high. 20% is still a LOT but it only applies to profit if you’re already in the top tax bracket AND have no other mitigating deductions or financial considerations.

Additionally, you can take a 1031 Exchange if you sell the property and buy another similar property. Then your capital gains tax is deferred until you sell that property and is 0%.

Thus if you do as I suggested you’d pay no capital gains at all. Which of course does not take into consideration the mortal peril such an act would place you in from your daughter-in-law.

All of this kind of nullifies your grousing about capital gains taxes. Your only complaint in that regards is if you handled the profits from the sale of that property very foolishly. You don’t seem to be a foolish person to me.

Like I said, you have my understanding but not my sympathy. If taxes are the main issue for you, there are things that can be done in that regard. Those things might not keep your daughter-in-law from killing you but then … In that case the real problem isn’t the capital gains taxes you’re bemoaning but something else.

People have to do what they have to do. When my sister and her husband moved here they had already bought a nice house on an acreage here and were paying a mortgage on it. Their house in California was paid off. When they sold the California house they immediately paid off the property here and pocketed the difference, which was significant. Not instant wealth but not insignificant either.

Point being, they owned two homes and didn’t live in more than one of them, only a single primary residence, at a time.

As far as I know they didn’t pay any capital gains tax at all but the home here is also their primary residence. They are residents of the state they live in and have no longer own property in other states.

As far as “people who are not rich” … Well in my book if you can afford a second home with taxes and maintenance expenses, and still afford to buy food — you’re rich. You might not have millions and millions of dollars in cash moldering in some investment account but you’re a long, long way from being poor too.

Not “uber-wealthy”, as I mentioned above those sorts own fabulous yachts, which I wistfully watch go by and admire deeply from my little fishing boat. They’re some amazing vessels. Those sorts can afford to pay a Coast Guard certified captain +/- $10,000 twice a year to move their boats to a conveniently accessible slip. Without incurring any hardships to themselves.

That’s truly and undeniably wealthy.

The upper middle class in America is also rich by any standards applied anywhere else around the globe.

The upper middle class in America is unimaginably wealthy in the view of 99.5% of their fellow human beings. Be very happy that you live in the United States of America and can plausibly deny being rich.

It’s been my first hand intimate experience that one thing rich people really, really hate is to be called rich. It’s embarrassing for some reason, even when their accumulated wealth is gained by their own efforts and good choices.

My sister and brother-in-law are rich by the same standards applied around the globe as I mentioned above. The difference between him and her is he’s a penny-pinching, penny wise and pound foolish miser. By being the cheapest ass among cheap-asses he wastes far more than he saves and he is wealthy enough that he can afford to do that. He’s a sour, miserable excuse for a human being. It wouldn’t make a bit of difference how much money he had, he’d still think of himself as being dirt poor and still pinch every penny until Lincoln screams while squandering thousands of dollars “saving money”.

Contrariwise my sister, having come from upper lower class relative poverty living paycheck-to-paycheck and lower middle class sufficiency in later childhood, like me, is simply very grateful for the wealth they’ve accumulated and if I call her “rich” she just laughs at me and says “eat your heart out, peasant”. In a very good natured and friendly tone of voice.

Guess which one is the happier person? Here’s a hint: Gratitude and an appreciation of scale go a long way towards living a happy life.

Here’s another hint. I’m grateful and appreciate scale too. I’m not anything that the most generous definition would apply the word “rich” to. I have enough to pay my bills, keep a roof over my head and feed myself. If I’m careful I can afford my bourbon, cigars and some gas money for my little boat. That’s about it. A person who can afford a recreational beachfront property in Florida falls in the same bracket to me as someone who owns a yacht they can afford to keep, maintain and transport.

But I’m happy. So happy that I KNOW if it had a house on the beach in Florida I would never complain about it in any way in a public forum. Count your blessings.

It’s called diversification of asset management. Not trusting our savings/stock market/the Fed, real estate is a spoke in the wheel of different options where to grow your money. I know that you know this. I bought property before I could afford it. I could never afford what I have now without risk.

“It’s called diversification of asset management.”

Of course I know that. That’s not the point. The point is that if you hold real estate that has become enough of a tax liability that you’re complaining about it in a public forum then you should consider divesting yourself of that holding and reinvesting that money in other real estate that is more tax friendly or tax neutral.

Because if your goal is diversification of asset management then the tax liability is part of the cost, above and beyond the cost of the real estate, that is a natural function of choosing that sort of diversification of your assets.

Real estate’s financial appreciation is a path to wealth. You buy real estate, build equity and use that equity to build more equity.

Some people do this by acquiring rental property like condos and apartment buildings. Where they let the tenants pay the bulk of the mortgage to build equity for them. Some do it by flipping houses or plots of land. Etc.

Some people do it by buying something they want anyway, like a beach house that they and their relatives will use because it’s there and they own it. They get to enjoy the tangible benefits of owning something like that as they allow that property to appreciate in value so they can liquidate it at some future date.

That’s a win-win scenario, unless you insist on keeping that property after it loses value as an asset. If the tax liability has gone that far, if will do nothing but get worse the longer you hold that asset.

If diversification of asset management is the primary goal, then there is no point where liquidation of that asset is off the table. It’s not a question of if but when.

If liquidation of that asset to use those funds for higher yielding investments, or sound and relatively safe investments that carry a lower tax liability, is not an active viable option then you’re holding that real estate for reasons other than diversification of asset management. You’re getting some benefit that you value more than an asset that is being diversified.

Like not being killed by your daughter-in-law. Which is fine and none of my business really.

If you’re going to exaggerate the actual capital gains loss of liquidating that asset in order to justify continuing to hold it then either you’re not being honest with yourself or you know all this and you’re not being honest with us.

You’re the one who complained, in a public forum, about a capital gains tax that you exaggerated for your own reasons. You would only pay capital gains taxes IF you cashed out that property and IF you did not reinvest that money in some other, more friendly annual property tax environment. If you did that you would pay very little or no capital gains tax at all.

That was my point. If you go around doing that then you have no complaint when someone like me points out the exaggeration and the solution to the dilemma you claim to have. Because …

You could solve the problem with both high beachfront State property taxes and any capital gains issues if you really wanted to. Assuming you’re above average intelligence makes if clear you don’t want to. That’s your call and wasn’t any of my business until you posted a complaint about something you could easily remedy if you wanted to.

Which brings me to my reason for discussing this with you. Most people, Conservative or Leftist, make things out to be worse than they actually are. I can understand when Leftists do this because as a rule they’re either wealthy elitists with an agenda or they’re just the stupids that blindly follow such people. I don’t like it and will take issue with fellow conservatives who behave that way. Because in my way of seeing things, Conservatives ought to know better than to use fruitless Leftist tactics to rationalize their actions.

Obviously you can sell or keep your beachfront home and not have to pay an exorbitant capital gains tax if you sell. I don’t really care.

If you keep it and then complain about it when it either gets more expensive than keeping it will financially justify, or just are not realizing the maximum imaginable return due to property taxes and other factors, that’s a choice you have made. That’s on you and if you can afford to do that then good for you. I’m happy for you.

I don’t do what Leftists do. I don’t envy people that have more stuff, or money, than I do. I’m living the best, most peaceful, most secure life I’ve ever had. I’m very, very grateful for that and gratitude leaves no room for vain envy.

Like I said, count your blessings.

Kieth, perhaps you should consider a 1031 like kind exchange? It won’t make your replacement 2nd home limited to the 3% normal homestead exempted property tax increases, but you might not be seeing your expected 300%?? But while I live in FL I am also not really much of a beach person and some folks really live for that lifestyle and situation. You would at least avoid or postpone the capital gains taxes.
But of course, the usual caveat to consult your tax advisor applies, as non-expert advice from me does not qualify.

There’s a reason none of the extended Bob family still lives in NJ anymore. Sucks, as there is so much I miss about that place. At some point handing over your paycheck to fund a corruptacracy is just too much

In Pennsyltucky we have 3 income tax forms to fill out every year: Federal, State, and Local. State income tax is still relatively low but very restrictive on deductions. This “low” rate is more than offset by property/school taxes which act like an annual drive-by shooting of retirees. Since teachers’ unions control the school boards and the budget, of course, they get to negotiate with themselves to vote for their own salaries and benefits. In my 30 years here, those taxes have tripled.

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