Niki Kelly has an article for the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette on the tax sale process. The context of the heightened concern about property tax sales is the recent increase in property taxes, but, as the article notes, it’s going to be a little while before anyone loses their home over the 2006 – pay 2007 taxes. You have to be delinquent about 18 months, have your property sold at tax sale, and then fail to redeem your property (by paying the unpaid tax plus fees and interest to the property tax purchaser) for a year after the tax sale.
Often times in the course of my debt collection business, I find myself telling folks that my job is to get my client’s bill to the front of the line but that I realize there are a few things I’m never going to get ahead of — a roof over their head, food on the table (and occasionally some court ordered fee that will land them in jail if they don’t pay.) Well, property taxes go in the “roof over the head” category. You ought to be paying that before you pay for your cell phone, before you pay for your cable, before you pay for your smokes, and before you pay for much more than food.
Probably my line of work has jaded me, but I see people kicked out of their homes all the time, primarily in the context of evictions and also in the context of foreclosures. I only do a handful of evictions and haven’t personally done any foreclosures, but I don’t see a problem with either legal proceeding. The point is, the government isn’t the only cold-hearted entity that requires you to pay money in exchange for maintaining roof over your head.
As for the current round of hand wringing over “throwing people out in the cold,” I wonder how these politicians have responded to the dramatic increase in foreclosures over the past few years. Or is it o.k. when a bank does it but not when the government does it?
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