Your Low-Tax Dream House: A New Approach to Slashing the Cost of Home Ownership [Paperback]

Steve Carlson (Author), Thomas Ring (Illustrator), Alden Pellett (Photographer)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1989

Everything you wanted to know about affordable building and remodeling... but couldn't find anywhere else! With a "low-tax strategy", you can minimize your property tax burden. You can also greatly reduce your mortgage, energy costs, and all other expenses of home ownership. Your Low-Tax Dream House will help you decipher the smoke and mirrors of property tax assessments, cut the costs of great kitchens and baths, choose an ideal location, and get tax breaks you didn't even know existed.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

These two books offer approaches to deriving maximum value from home ownership through shrewd building and renovation strategies. Lieberman and Hoffman focus on "forced appreciation." This involves finding the right property to renovate, assessing real market potential, estimating costs, managing the work of renovation, and making design and construction decisions that yield the greatest buyer excitement. After creditably outlining these strategic factors, the book bogs down in a series of repetitious chapters that cover room-by-room renovations. (Once is quite enough to point out that mirrors can enlarge a small room.) The occasional line drawings meant to illustrate dramatic floor plan makeovers lack detail and inspiration. As an amateur builder-renovator and former "local tax assessment official," Carlson offers strategies for lowering home ownership costs by reducing or eliminating features that boost property taxes. Elements of construction that keep taxes down coincidentally keep building and upkeep costs down as well; these include choosing a basic structural design, using alternatives to central heating (and incorporating as much tax-free thermal mass as possible), keeping storage areas unfinished, minimizing built-ins, and so on. While sounding gimmicky, Carlson's book offers many practical insights on assessments (a 70-page appendix summarizes the assessment practices in all 50 states) and looks at cost factors overlooked in more conventional sources. Written with some flair--"The advantages of manufactured housing are indentical to the advantages of frozen dinners"--this is the preferred choice for libraries looking for another source on housing and renovation.
- Bill Demo, Tompkins Cortland Community Coll . , Dryden, N.Y.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

Pertinent information...strategies that can save you money. Illustrations, glossary, index and enough humor...keep this subject from becoming hard to digest. -- Better Homes and Gardens: Building Ideas, spring issue 1990

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Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Upper Access (November 1989)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0942679075
• ISBN-13: 978-0942679076
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.9 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #426,650 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Very Valuable Advice, July 19, 2001

By 

Charles D. Hayes (Wasilla, AK USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Your Low-Tax Dream House: A New Approach to Slashing the Cost of Home Ownership (Paperback)

It's too bad a book doesn't get a star for every thousand dollars the reader might save by reading it because if this were the case "Your Low-Tax Dream House" would have at least 30 or 40 stars. There are lots of books about how to save money when you are building a house, but this is the first one I've ever read that shows you how you can maximize your comfort while insuring that you don't pay an unnecessary fortune in taxes during the life of your home. Every building contractor should read this book as a strategy for basic survival, but if you are building your own home independently, then you can't afford not to read it.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Things I wouldn't have thought of!, April 13, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Your Low-Tax Dream House: A New Approach to Slashing the Cost of Home Ownership (Paperback)

When my husband and I started thinking about building a home, we had no idea how many books were out there on the subject. Your Low-Tax Dream House was the best we found! It's not going to teach you to swing a hammer or lay down flooring. It's going to teach you strategies for avoiding high property taxes and keeping your heating/cooling costs low. Simple things... like how having an 'island' in your kitchen that's on wheels instead of built-in can really cut down your taxes. Or how central heating is one of the worst ways people waste money on heat. Things we never would have known. We ended up using probably 30 tips from this book. Our house is finished, just what we wanted, and didn't (and still doesn't) cost us an arm and a leg.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Informative and easy-to-read, January 2, 2002

By 

S. L. Moore "book_finder" (Seattle, WA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Your Low-Tax Dream House: A New Approach to Slashing the Cost of Home Ownership (Paperback)

This book describes ways you can build or fix up your house frugally. It discusses aspects of homeownership I'd never thought of before from the perspective of someone who's been there. Most useful for those who are trying to minimize their housing expenses rather than build equity in a home for resale. It also has a great section in the back describing property tax laws, assessments and how to appeal them in each US state.