Property Taxes
Hi, Peeps here:
One of my Truro friends, who is good with numbers and financial matters, was recently saying to me that she was feeling a little bit like my poor . Her taxes feel like they have been going up slowly over time, where she too feels like she's a frog in a pot of water where the temperature goes slowly up.
That got me thinking about Croak again, so I decided to do a little research. I took a building lot with nothing on it and researched its property taxes for the past 20 years. Since there is no house on the lot, the valuation would not change because of an addition or some other improvement, so this seemed to provide a good example to use to isolate the increase in taxes due to the tax rate alone.
I then used the national Bureau of Labor Statistics consumer price index for the Northeast as a measure of inflation and recorded and graphed that as well. And then I plotted both the taxes and the inflation measure, CPI-U, on a graph together so I could see them side-by-side.
The graph below shows the increase since the year 2000 in both Truro taxes and inflation as measured above. A dotted trendline was added to the tax graph so you can see the trend more clearly.
Truro property taxes vs. CPI-U inflation, 2000–present
My takeaway is that Truro taxes have over the past two decades been growing four times faster than the rate of inflation (approximately 200% increase vs. a 50% increase). Granted this is just a sample of one property, but the best sample you can take is to see what is happening to your own property taxes .