Your Property Tax Money IS BEING STOLEN!

Here's something funny. A lot of people are so against living in an HOA, right? Because of all the corruption, because of all of the rules and everything that happens in there. Oh, I never want to be a part of that. I don't blame you. It's terrible. What people don't realize is that if you pay property taxes, you're a part of the largest HOA and the biggest scam there is. Because property taxes are basically one of the biggest scams there is. And today I'm going to prove it to you. Because in Santa Cruz County in Arizona, a treasurer there was just arrested and she admitted and pleaded guilty to stealing $38 million of taxpayer money. Guys, think about how much money that is. $38 million. Think about every time you've seen your property taxes go up and all the justifications of why it needs to go up and X, Y, and Z. So we need to collect all this extra money. Otherwise, we're going to have budget shortfalls for this, that, and the other thing. Meanwhile, you have people like this that work at the county that find ways to steal all this money. And guess what? This has been going on since 2012 and she was only just now caught. So this woman's been able to get away with this for the past 12 years. She used the money to renovate her homes, you know, homes, plural, right? She bought at least 20 cars. She used the money to pay for her personal expenses for herself, her family, everything. I don't know how she got away with it for so long because all she was doing is she was transferring money out of the county's bank account to her own personal bank accounts. Like nobody noticed that for 12 years. There's no oversight on stuff like this. She says, I wire transfer the Santa Cruz County funds from the county savings account and checking account for the purpose and as an essential part of carrying out the scheme to defraud and fraudulently obtain the funds for my personal use all without authorization. Oh, I'm sure if you would have asked their permission, I'm sure they would have been just fine with it. She says, yeah, I owe restitution to the county in the amount of 38.7 million dollars. Like, do you think the county is ever going to see this money back? Even if they seize all of her assets and sell everything off, do you think that's going to be equivalent to 38 million dollars? Of course not. She also used fake business accounts to help conceal the transfer of funds from the Santa Cruz County accounts to her account. These account names were materially false and fraudulent representations to intentionally conceal the fact that I was wire transferring money to myself. And now she wants to take responsibility for the harm that she's caused to the county. Well, I don't know how you're going to do that. Here we have a house that was sold back in 2018 for 1.4 million. And back then it was initially listed for rent for 7,800 dollars a month. And then they end up lowering the price all the way down to 6,800 back in 2019. They took it off the market for rent, apparently never rented it. And then back in 2021, listed it for 9,000 dollars a month. I thought that's not a good idea. Let's list it for 15,000 dollars a month in 2022. Then they lowered the price, lowered the price, lowered the price, all the way fast forward to today where they're asking just barely under 10,000 dollars a month. And this house has been sitting empty for the past six years. Congratulations. That's the right way to be a landlord. Just lose thousands and thousands of dollars every single month over greed. That's why when they say, oh we have this housing shortage and we need to build all these houses. No, we don't guys. We have so many empty houses just here in Miami alone that if these houses were just rented for the fair market value or sold for people that aren't living in the houses or whatever, then there would be a glut of inventory enough to crash the entire housing market. I guarantee it. It's just that there are so many listings out there like this that are sitting empty either because of greed, negligence, whatever, and nothing happens about it. So this woman, she had to surrender her passport that was part of her bail agreement and now she is going to be sentenced on February 6th of next year. So she has a little bit of time to kind of kiss her life goodbye because she could be facing up to 35 years in prison and she's going to be having to pay the restitution of course and federal taxes in the amount of 13 million dollars for the amount of money that she stole. So it's funny that like she stole all this money, right? It's not even her 38 million dollars, but somehow the federal government is going to charge her 13 million dollars in federal taxes as income just because they're treating it like income. It wasn't income. It was stolen money. So even the federal government has the nerve to charge you taxes on money that you stole that was never yours to begin with. How messed up is that? Speaking of messed up, here's something else for you guys. I read a story recently that talked about how down here in Florida and a lot of other climate risk areas where we have a higher risk than other areas where we're more susceptible to hurricanes and flooding and all that stuff, we have higher insurance rates already, right? Well, they're saying that we should also have much higher mortgage rates in places like this to deter people from buying homes in these areas. What do you think about that? This is not my idea by the way. So this person says part of the problem is Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, they back pretty much all of the mortgages that are made out there. They buy up all the mortgage-backed securities and basically the strategy is by pooling the mortgages from around the country, these agencies diversify themselves from local shocks, which will have lower compensation for default risk. So they're basically, the idea here with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is we buy up mortgages from the entire country and that kind of spreads the risk out evenly. A time when we saw that that strategy didn't work at all was during the 2008 great financial crisis when the entire country went down all at once. In fact, the losses were so large back then that it required a taxpayer bailout. But they say some places like Florida, for example, are much more likely to get hit by a hurricane. Since we've been keeping track in the 1850s, the U.S. has gotten slammed by about 300 hurricanes and 120 of them have made landfall in Florida. And the government-backed mortgage securities kind of subsidizes people buying in these more climate risk areas like here. And they say when mortgage rates are too low in these high risk areas, it encourages building in dangerous locations and having people move there. And the taxpayers' climate exposure gets worse over time. Now, I understand the point that this person's trying to make because it's the same point with the insurance, right? Like we get slammed here in Florida and then everybody else nationwide ends up seeing an increase as well because the insurance companies are trying to recover that money and subsidize that risk. Wow, these prices around here are just hilarious, guys. Here we have a double flip, okay? Purchased in 2021 for $5.5 million, essentially. Then they tried to get $85,000 a month in rent. And then that person sold it for $9.25, so almost doubled their money. They did pretty good in 2023. And now the next person is trying their hand at flipping it. And they turned around and listed it for sale for $16.7 million back in December last year. So it's already been a year on the market, empty house, okay? And now they are down to $10.9 million, guys. Think about that. They went from $16.7 million on this house down to $10.9 million. Their last price cut was $2 million. Imagine seeing a $2 million price cut here on Zillow. And while that's all happening, they have a six-figure a year property tax bill. 2023 was $92,000. So you know going into next year, it's probably going to be over a hundred grand. Another empty house, guys. Like I said, if this place would just be sold or rented for fair market value, someone would be living in that house. That's already two empty houses on this street that are nice renovated homes that someone could be living in. Not saying give it away or have the government pay for it or anything like that. I'm just saying sell it or rent it for the real price, okay? That's it. So this proposal says that we should increase mortgage rates for people living in these high-risk areas. And they're saying, listen, the biggest risk is that if Florida gets hit with another massive hurricane, then property insurers might not be able to pay out the full amount, which they never do. At a time when mortgage defaults would already be higher than the baseline due to the recession that we're essentially in. So they're saying that's a huge risk for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. And that's why the interest rates need to be higher. It's not enough just to have high insurance rates in these areas. They're already getting hit with that, but you need to have high mortgage rates too, to make it so prohibitively expensive that essentially no one would want to move here unless you can really afford to bear that cost. Let me know what you guys think about this in the comments, because I have never heard an idea like this up until now. And I'm all for building stronger homes, guys. These houses that got wiped out by the recent hurricane, clearly no home like that should ever be built in those areas again. They need to build homes that can 100% withstand a category five hurricane. What that looks like, I don't know. I'm not a home builder, but I've seen some examples of this and it can be done. Is it more expensive? Yeah, of course. But if you want to live in those areas, that's what makes the most sense to do. Not rebuild your house of cards and let it get blown away again. And this person says that the high insurance premiums are not enough because it only represents about 5% of the mortgage payment. So I don't know. Let's see if something like this is ever going to happen in the future. I wouldn't put it past them and feel like anything is possible in this day and age. So maybe it will. Now I want to give a couple more property tax stories here because first of all, in case you didn't know that if you were impacted by one of the recent hurricanes here in Florida and your house was unlivable for 30 days or more, you can actually be eligible for a partial refund of your property taxes. Did you know that? Per Florida state law, it's possible to receive a refund on a portion of your property taxes if the property was rendered uninhabitable for at least 30 days due to the catastrophe. Of course, you have to have supporting documents and proof that that was the case. And I found all this out through the company I partnered with a few months ago, Ownwell, who does property tax protests on your behalf. So I thought that was pretty cool because they sent this to me because I'm a client of theirs now. And it's nice to see a company being proactive. Like here's another way we can save you money if this happened to you. Here we have another one that's not a flip, but they've been trying to sell this house for a very long time. In fact, since March of 2023. So they're coming up on their two-year anniversary here pretty soon of trying to sell this house. Initial listing price was $3.6 million. They also listed it for rent for $13,000 a month in May of 2023. And they actually thought it was a good idea to raise the price in the same time period up to $3.7 million. Then they went up to $3.95 million because that wasn't enough. And then they decided, oh, it's not selling. Let's raise it to $4.3 million. An even better idea. No, that didn't work. Let's raise it up to $4.6. No, $4.7. That's the right price. And now they've settled on $4.5 million. You know, the geniuses that take these listings and perform all these shenanigans on this house is just laughable to me, guys. Like these real estate agents think they're going to get some huge payday. And instead, they're just running around like chickens with their head cut off, wasting all of their time, energy, and gas trying to sell a house that's never going to sell, playing all these pricing games. And when I see that, honestly, it makes me so happy that I am not in the business anymore. I just can sit here and laugh about it now on YouTube. Now, one of my viewers sent me another story about property tax reassessment that resulted in a massive increase. And I'm not going to read the whole story to you guys, but basically what happened is this. This person is living in a duplex and they've lived in this place for 25 years. And it's a duplex that they don't rent, right? It's like you own one side and your neighbor owns the other side type of duplex. And a lot of the information on the property tax reassessment was actually just flat out wrong. It was the wrong number of bedrooms, wrong number of separate rooms, the age of the building was incorrect, all kinds of errors. And a year and a half later, they got their reassessment, which was based on all of this wrong information. And then the neighbor actually got the property tax reassessment bill first, and they thought it must've been a mistake that it was for the whole building. Nope. It was actually just for one side. They assessed each side of this duplex at $1.6 million, okay? So, they reached out to their realtor friend and they said that each place could easily be sold for about $950,000, but not $1.6 million. Talking about reality here, just like we've been seeing with these listings. But the last this person knew was that their house was valued around $650,000. So, the home has jumped $300,000 in value in the real world, but has gone up a million dollars in value according to the county. And now, of course, the market's already turning around and starting to go down, but yet you got this person stuck with this massive property tax bill due to all the inflation that we've seen. That's the situation for so many people that have seen their property tax bill spike. But apparently, this is really weighing on this person. They haven't been able to sleep well, and they're afraid that the taxes are going to go so high that they won't be able to live in the property anymore. They say the flood insurance is already up by 50%, and the HOA and condo insurance went up 20% last year, and now they're facing this increase as well. This couple doesn't even have a mortgage, okay guys? They own this property free and clear, but they said between the insurance and the tax increases, it could be enough to force them out of their home. They have a pension and a social security. That's what they live off of, and that's it. And moving would be very difficult because obviously prices everywhere are extremely high right now. And by the way, this is happening in Delaware. So, people are facing these criminal and egregious increases in taxes just like that, sometimes based on false reassessments of their properties. The last time I heard about this was a story out of Chicago, where this was happening to people in Cook County, where people were getting these massive reassessments on their homes based on false information. So, you really got to watch out for this kind of thing. I'm not saying this is common, but yet it's another example of how property taxes are a giant scam. Now, as if we don't have enough problems in the housing market already, the Trump administration has an idea of what they want to do with some of the housing problems. And they also believe that one of the biggest problems we have in this country is a shortage of housing. They say that we're about 7 million homes short right now. Well, I just found a few of them right here on this street that aren't selling. So, maybe we don't have that shortage after all. Maybe you should take a look at that. The government invests in rebuilding highways and other infrastructure. So, why don't we focus on remodeling housing? As of the 2022 data, more than 89 million homes in the U.S. are at least 35 years old, which represents about 62% of the total housing stock, which means many of these homes are in major need of modernization. So, how would they go about doing that, you might ask? Oh, I'm glad you asked, because what they want to do is they want to give SBA loans to home flippers. But it's not just giving them SBA loans. They also want to start treating house flipping profits as capital gains. And one way they're going to do that is by incentivizing home flipping in areas that need revitalization, which are called opportunity zones. So, not only will we expand these opportunity zones, but we'll also give home flippers a break on taxes and treat it as capital gains rather than ordinary taxes. And we'll expand the Fannie and Freddie mandate. And essentially what that would do, they would carve out a portion of their portfolios for structured finance products, including fix and flip loans. And then the third thing they would do is what I mentioned already, is extend SBA loans to home flippers. They say the government already supports business-owned real estate and other inventory assets under the SBA. So, why not the same for revitalizing homes? Already over the past few years, the amount of homes that are being sold, about 10% of them were actually home flips. So, the private flip market is already alive and well. So, why do they need to subsidize it further? But they say this is much better than aiming at construction because home flippers can add a lot of inventory a lot faster to the market. They can turn around a home in months, whereas it takes years for building brand new construction. It's also good for the local economy, creates jobs for construction workers, real estate agents, property managers, and of course, the whole host of other people involved with buying and flipping a home. But you know, just by the tone of this, it's just, you can tell that everybody always has their own interests with these things, guys. Like, when Biden's president, you know, the idea was, let's give everybody free money. Let's give everybody zero percent down payments on mortgages. Let's give everybody one percent down payments. You don't even have to pay the mortgage if you don't want to. Stuff like that, right? But now with Trump, they're like, oh, let's give free money to home flippers and create housing that way. I'm not against home flippers in general, okay? But the problem is, there's no oversight with this, okay? I've heard from you guys, as well as many other people who have bought homes that were flips, and it's been nothing but a horror story of all these problems with the house, where essentially all they did was put lipstick on a pig. And meanwhile, people paid top dollar for these homes, and the home flipper got away with murder. So, these people that are going to be getting these SBA loans or, you know, big tax incentives to do this, what incentive do they have to do the right thing and do a flip properly? There's probably going to be no oversight on that. That's the main issue I have with policies like this. Biden's is no better, guys. They're both terrible. So, I'm just mentioning that. It's not like I'm taking sides on this and thinking whatever they're doing right now is so much better, because it isn't. And you also have to realize that there are two different types of home flippers. There are the type of home flippers that do it the right way, that gut the property, replace everything that needs to be replaced, you know, the plumbing, the electrical if necessary, all of the bones of the house that are really important, along with the cosmetic stuff, okay? And then they turn around and sell it for a profit. Those people earn every dollar they make, okay? They just do, because that's the right way to do it. The person is essentially getting what is a brand new house or as close to it that you could get without tearing down the old house. But then you have the much shadier type of home flipper that just puts the lipstick on the pig. And I don't know what the percentage of them is out there that just do that, but I'd be willing to bet that there's more of them like that than the honest ones that are doing it the correct way, because it's more profitable and most people are just in it to make a quick buck. So those type of people are just preying on the sucker buyers, the idiots that don't know any better and don't understand what they're buying and don't do the proper amount of due diligence when buying the property and essentially get away with murder, selling them a piece of crap house that, you know, was just painted and kind of glossed over a little bit. So I don't know how they should do this, but if they're going to be giving home flippers money, then it should definitely be going to well-qualified and well-established businesses that have a great reputation for doing the right thing, not for some fly-by-night person that just wants to cash in and make a quick dollar off the government. But of course, that's what always happens. Every time the government decides to hand out money, you can guarantee there's going to be a massive level of fraud, just like we saw during the pandemic and just like we're going to see whenever programs like this get rolled out. And who pays for all of it? You and I do, because all of that is taxpayer money down the drain. And also it's a lot of heartbreak and hard lessons learned buying a house that you thought was in great condition because it looked nice in the pictures and turns out to be nothing but a nightmare. And also one more point on this is what makes you think that flipping houses is going to add more inventory to the market, guys? Just the houses we saw in this neighborhood, you know, two out of three of them are flips that are sitting empty right now. Those houses don't really count as inventory. Yeah, they're sitting on the market, but they're not moving. No one's renting. No one's buying these houses. So how does that really help the economy? It doesn't. And obviously those people have to suffer financially because they're not having their home move. They're paying to hold that property each and every month that they don't sell or rent it, so they get punished that way. But then the government's going to be subsidizing that behavior. We were just talking about earlier in the video how they want to get rid of low interest rates for people buying in areas that are more prone to big climate events. Well, what about not giving money to people that don't want to do the right thing? It doesn't make sense to give a home flipper money and turn around and have a house on the market for two or three years. If they're going to do something like that, there needs to be a massive amount of oversight, which you know is not going to happen. Just like during the pandemic, they gave away way more money than they're probably ever going to give away in these programs, and there was no oversight with that. Only just now some people are getting arrested, but how many people are going to get away with a massive amount of fraud? Also, as I'm sitting here about to finish up the edit on this video, I can't believe I forgot to mention the most important thing. What about these flippers like we see in the videos all the time that just buy these houses, do absolutely nothing. No repairs, no upgrades, nothing. They just turn around, buy the house, and then try to sell it for another million, two million dollars for the next greater fool that will come along and buy the house. Those people don't deserve any money from anybody. That is just a parasite as far as I'm concerned. That doesn't do anything for the economy. It doesn't help anybody do well except for that person, and it definitely doesn't create more housing for people who need it. If you enjoyed this video, make sure you subscribe to the channel, and if you don't want to wait for my next video to come out, check out this one on the screen right over here, and I'll see you in the next one.