Reminder: Civic Parent is for general teaching and educational purposes. Nothing on Civic Parent should be considered tax, accounting, or legal advice. Always consult a professional and come to agreed-upon terms if you need help with your specific facts and circumstances. With property tax appeals in particular, attorneys and real estate agents are licensed professionals...Continue reading
I am sharing below selected portions of a post I wrote (here) in March 2023 about why school tax is increasing in Jersey City. A crucial link is tax base growth. Jersey City property tax payers are now shouldering a much greater share of the school funding paradigm than in previous years; there is important...Continue reading
This workpaper is a visual of the “Property Tax Tables” available from the NJ Department of Community Affairs (DCA) website. A picture of that site, as of this writing is below: A few facts about this public site, why it’s important, and why I visualized it: 1–This is where the state publishes standardized property tax...Continue reading
This is part of a 2023 series about property tax in NJ. View the series landing page here. An upfront caveat: the levy is a topic with vast scope beyond what I can and want to cover here. There is a lot more you can reference; for instance, a good read if you have the...Continue reading
New Jersey has 21 county tax boards and I’ve got links to their websites below (links are current as of the writing of this post). Click on a county to see the related information including the county board of taxation websites. These links are current as of March 2023 and are of course subject to...Continue reading
I'm excited to share my first workshop which will happen tomorrow, Sunday March 26th at 2pm in SPU's McIntyre Hall located on JFK Boulevard between Montgomery and Glenwood, which I've mapped below. The deadline for property tax appeals is rapidly approaching in Hudson County (and many other counties, too). To help community members engage the nuance,...Continue reading
This post is from 2023 and so some details are dated / relevant to last year. I will be writing more about tax appeals in 2024. In my previous post I touched upon “implied” market value. In this post I want to touch upon NJ’s “Chapter 123” law which I last wrote about in 2021,...
This post is from 2023 and so some details are dated / relevant to last year. I will be writing more about tax appeals in 2024. In advance of my upcoming property tax appeals workshop on March 26th, I’ve been thinking about how to distill property tax appeals math in the most intuitive way possible....
The tax bill offers a highly personalized context to connect our property (the basis of our property tax) with the larger system of property taxation in the community (which involves the levy, the tax base, and the resulting tax rates). But the tax bill is not entirely transparent as to: determining if the assessed value...Continue reading
To follow the public money and better understand what’s driving your property tax bills, you have to know when to engage the process. Understanding the “when” can take a taxpayer into a series of bureaucratic rabbit holes (I’ve heard this feedback from others and I’ve also experienced it myself), so I want to disclaim upfront:...Continue reading
Throughout this series I am using resources and links from a variety of sources. I’m sharing as I go and will update this page as the series progresses. Helpful initial resources: NEW JERSEY HOMEOWNER’S GUIDE TO PROPERTY TAXES TOOLKIT. This is “a comprehensive resource answering homeowners’ everyday questions about how their home’s value is assessed, how...Continue reading
This data was published by the NJ Department of Community Affairs (that site is here). Each year, the state collects prior year property tax data and published them in standalone Excel files. I've been compiling the data year on year and now have all of them in Tableau. In 2019 I published a property tax...Continue reading
I am launching a 2023 series on CivicParent about the local government budget process and property tax. My hope is for this series to be: A practical roadmap for taxpayers who may want to engage the 2023 local budget cycle in their community. Primarily targeted at taxpayers who are relatively new to the realm of...
This post made my head spin a bit … the math and timing is wonky and confusing. I’ve done my best to break it down and welcome dialog and feedback about anything that is unclear. This past week, Jersey City’s municipal council passed its annual 2022 budget with a $112 million increase to the city...Continue reading
Let's take a look at how a tax bill comes together. It's an interesting and empowering exercise to tie your local government budgets - and the property taxes needed to fund them - to your personal property tax.Every year, the state publishes town-by-town property tax data here that includes a wealth of information including tax...Continue reading
A "levy" is the amount raised in property tax to fund a government budget. Typically, a levy is one of multiple sources of revenue that fund total expense. In 2021, Jersey City is poised to both fully fund its schools and also enter a new paradigm with respect to property tax. Let's review what's happening...Continue reading
The 2020 property tax tables for calendar year 2020 are now available. This data provides insight into the way municipal, county, and local public school governments share the total tax dollars each year. The dataset at the link contains: Tax base data Tax levy data – this is what I’ve visualized below Tax rate data...
Sharing an open letter and thoughts that I read into the record at the City Council meeting on Oct 7, 2020. I’m publishing it on CivicParent as part of a new area of content related to Jersey City’s increasingly outdated assessed values and the growing need for another revaluation. The last revaluation was in 2017/18....Continue reading
For the past 4 years I’ve been researching and writing about property taxes and revaluation (among other topics) on CivicParent. In the past year I’ve also written about tax appeals and I also served on a team of Jersey City Together volunteers in 2017 that helped over 30 residents save over $40,000 in tax expense...
I received my new tax postcard in the mail yesterday so I figured I'd share a breakdown of how to read it. This is very similar to the former tax post card, with some notable exceptions: You can now see your NEW tax assessed value. This is the value assigned to your property by Appraisal...Continue reading
Learn how to compute if your property tax expense will go up or down in a citywide revaluation. It’s helpful to have a calculator, pen, and paper on hand while watching this video.