5.1 Earthquake rumbles SoCal as Hiliary streams in , page 3

originally posted by: CoyoteAngels
a reply to: rickymouse

Im retired here, and am no millionaire. I pay around 150 a month for housing as that is my property tax under Prop 13 limits. And it's paid for. 4 bedrooms a mile from the beach.

Gasoline is high. Utilities are high, but because the weather is mild, I don't use much. I have solar panels on my house and feed the grid.

Food isn't taxed and I dont think it's any more expensive than other places.

Cant beat the wonderful weather.

We got a similar tax here, we have lived here for thirty two years and there is a limit of two percent hike in property value every year. Now it cost us about sixty grand to build our house back then, I built it myself. Now the house has an assessment of about one hundred five grand and homeowners don't have to pay the school tax here if it is their primary residence. But the sev is now about 269k so someone who buys it or inherits it will have to pay tax on the two sixty nine. If I even build a ten by ten shed, or put in an emergency generator which requires a substantial cost and permit...improvement to the property, the tax jumps to the 269k. I can't even pour a slab of sidewalk or it unlocks it and our taxes go up almost two and a half fold. We now pay about twelve hundred a year and we cannot afford to start paying three grand a year with us both on social security. Our wages here were not great...low cost of living equals lower wages around here before. So our income is only about twenty five hundred bucks a month after paying the medicare premium. But the house is paid off since before the wife retired, and we have no credit card debt. We do have supplemental health care coverage we pay every month but it is only about a hundred twenty bucks a month so far. Considering my medical costs for the last year are 0.00 and the wife only had about five hundred bucks in total medical and meds copay, we are doing all right.

Our medical bills and meds went down after we started eating lots more homemade foods and are avoiding junk foods more now. No more than twenty percent highly processed foods and we are doing better. At twenty five percent highly processed we were having some issues, so we started reducing the stuff a little and we got healthier instead of worse with our age.

Tomorrow I am making beef soup/stew with good organic grass fed beef and mostly organic or local veggies. I have not bought any store bought eggs in almost a year, we get ours from a local person who feeds them well and they go outside even in the winter most days. It is the flavor of foods we are going after, and the ingredients we use to make our foods are pretty decent. We spend more on them, but less on doctor bills.

We have high electric bills and heating bills here though. At least our water is cheap to pump from our well and we have a septic tank...pumped once every four or five years at two hundred bucks. We live within our means, and the only draw on our savings is from the losses incurred the last three years in the stock market.

Hopefully we can both stay out of the nursing home so the kids can inherit something when we die.