Our A.V.I. Surprise

Before I get into our latest home owner surprise, I should mention that, although we are moving to an "up and coming" neighborhood, it isn't exactly "up" yet... It will be really interesting to see how my friends, who are moving to brand new, beautiful developments in the suburbs, are going to react to our new city home. 

The lot next to our house just a year ago.. G-H-E-T-T-O

Last Sunday as I was packing for the week, Andrew was reading me articles from our new favorite blog, NakedPhilly. The blog is great because it breaks down all the activities going on in Philadelphia, by neighborhood. Two of my favorite planned improvements in our neighborhood include:

Carpenter Square, an eleven-home development planned for 17th & Carpenter, which is currently an empty lot a block east of our new house. These homes are expected to sell for around $470K and it's rumored that a brand new restaurant is going in as part of the project!

The proposal for a five story building at the corner of 16th and Washington Avenue, the dividing line to the ghetto. It is my biggest hope that Washington Avenue improves sooner than later, because it is pretty gross today.

As we were happily chatting about all the awesome things happening in our neighborhood, Andrew came across this article. Naked Philly was oh so generous to break things down even further for us. So here are the basics:

• The Philadelphia City Council has reassessed the home values of every home in Philadelphia
• The reason for this change is that residential properties have generally been under assessed under the current system, while commercial properties have been assessed at values much closer to the “actual value” 
• Based on that assessment, there has been an approved property-tax rate of 1.34% for every home in the city

So what does this mean for us?? Not unlike most people in Graduate Hospital, the property tax on our home today is based on the $25,000 price paid for the home in the 1990s. We did NOT pay $25,000 for our house but, when we bought the house, we expected our taxes to continue being based on this number. The Property Search tool allowed us to look up our new assessment and estimated taxes. We quickly discovered that our taxes are going up by over 600% beginning January 2014. OUCH!! This means our monthly mortgage payment will be increasing approximately $400 every month. We just used our life savings to put 20% down on the house! We want to put a beautiful new kitchen in!

After discovering this, I cried, we talked it over, and just decided that we are going to have to get thrifty and be smart about our money. We are going to move forward with the house and if the kitchen has to wait a few more months, so be it :(