Who here owns 5 or more acres?

[dewey]

1) Yes, different parcels up to 2000 acres, largest is the family's 2000 acre ranch.
2) Passed down for over 100 years from generation to generation, homesteaded bare dirt originally.
3) Cattle ranching then haying 2000 acres every year pays its costs and upkeep.

The main house and barns and bunk houses and other outbuildings were built by family, no financing.

 

[theoldchick]

36.83 acres

Refinanced another property which was nearly paid for. Sold the original property and paid off the current parcel, and built a house on it.

 

[speckledhen]

Speaking of selling wood, in Georgia, land is assessed as if there was no standing timber on it. When and if you sell it, you then have to pay property taxes on that wood, per ton, depending on what type of wood it is, going by a chart that is updated yearly. We just went through this with the county. They say south Ga is to blame with its millions of acres of standing pines for lumber, that the entire state suffers for that. They have officials cruising around checking for it to see if it looks like you have cut wood off your place. The only time you get off scott free is if you are using it for your own firewood or if you give the timber away, say in exchange for someone taking it off for doing the work, assuming all the risk and doing the labor.

Wood is worth less this year than last year, at least in my county. Folks think timber is worth something, but here in GA, unless you have good yellow pine for lumber, it's worth almost ZERO. The exceptions are sawtimber or poles, IF you take them to the mill yourself. If not, you get the going rate from whoever takes it off your land, about $5/ton.

Hardwood for firewood is valued at just over $4 per ton, softwood pulp is worth just under $9 per ton. It must be divided by exactly what type of tree you take off. Not all pines are equal, not all hardwoods are equal. You won't get rich selling timber in GA unless you have hundreds of acres of pine suitable for good lumber. Hardwood is worth almost nothing at all here, we found. Interesting. And because they are raising land taxes beyond our means, we cannot own our acreage we want any longer, sadly. Doesn't matter that you can't sell it for anything, they'll tax it as if you can.

Sooooo, 5.37 acres soon to be less, unfortunately. 5 was always my magic number. Not so magic any longer in this day and time. That really bites, too.


For those interested, here is the chart of timber values in Georgia that they go by, that varies by county:

https://etax.dor.ga.gov/PTD/cas/timber/tables/2012/LGS_Table_of_Owner_Harvest_Timber_Values_2012.pdf

If you have the equipment (saws, truck, skidder, etc) can take it to the mill yourself and do all the dangerous work, you can make more. If you have someone else do it and pay you, the going rate here is $5 per ton, period. That is per loggers as well as the county forester. Not worth the trouble and the mess to have logging equipment tear up your ground and do a clear cut if you have small acreage you must look at every day, if you can get a logger to even look at small acreage. Most will not bother.


Owning acreage for a homestead, to do what you want and for privacy, etc, is a dream of many BYC folks. That dream may be crushed in a day of money-hungry counties reassessing to grab tax money. Remember Californians years ago whose houses worth $100-200K were suddenly supposedly worth a million? Reminds me of that on a smaller scale.

I apologize for getting a bit off track. For those who own big acreage, are you being taxed to death over it? And have the reassessed it in recent years? Do you anticipate a problem with that when they do?

 

[rebelcowboysnb]

Speckledhen, that sounds like a local issues being blamed on the state. My land taxes were $28 this year for my 3 acres, an old trailer an a house all valued at $49,500. Its about $300 in taxes before exemptions. The guy behind me has 10 acres an half was wooded until 2 years ago where he had it cut an made about half to what the land was worth. I have not seen anyone that has been charged tax on cut wood. The only time I have ever seen someone mad about taxes here had 900 acres an thought $1000 was to much..

 

[ivan3]

speckledhen wrote: Sooooo, 5.37 acres soon to be less, unfortunately. 5 was always my magic number. Not so magic any longer in this day and time. That really bites, too.

Sorry you're having these problems, Cyn.

Maybe dig into State rates (exact definitions) on land primarily used ag/horticultural? Up here, in MO. Rates on the best of the Subclass (ag/hort) are currently .29 cents per acre. So, renting out for grass production/grazing is an option.

How to in urban area: http://www.kshb.com/dpp/news/local_...-tax-savings-by-labeling-vacant-land-as-farms

Cut out a couple acres of `diseased' trees and grow the ubiquitous Wisteria for sale on EBAY???

We bought land South of Columbia, MO., in the early `80's. But the inevitable rezoning/sprawl sent us North. Now we keep an extremely close eye on what parcels are being sold to whom and the machinations of the County Planning and Zoning Commission (always support $$ all candidates for our County Commissioner, always vote for the one that lives the closest and remember to take a couple bottles of our blackberry/raspberry compote to him/her and thank them for taking on the `burden' (at least he/she will remember those constituents if they call for service).

Best of luck to the both of you and the chooks!

 

[speckledhen]

Speckledhen, that sounds like a local issues being blamed on the state. My land taxes were $28 this year for my 3 acres, an old trailer an a house all valued at $49,500. Its about $300 in taxes before exemptions. The guy behind me has 10 acres an half was wooded until 2 years ago where he had it cut an made about half to what the land was worth. I have not seen anyone that has been charged tax on cut wood. The only time I have ever seen someone mad about taxes here had 900 acres an thought $1000 was to much..

My question. to get back on the subject of how many acres you own, is if you own bigger acreage and they bump your taxes way up, will you sell (if you even could)?

 

[rebelcowboysnb]

Not just him, no one in Dade as far as I know has ever did that. The state has rules about what can be taxed but how that is enforced is all on the county. Dade as far as I know has never enforced such a thing. I tried to find 48-5-7.5 but can't seem to. Dont have woodland so... Here is the state laws if you want to look though. http://www.lexisnexis.com/hottopics/gacode/default.asp
I may ask the tax commissioner when I go down this week. (tag time)


Just so you know my land has been reassessed more than once in the last few years after the Yankee invasion housing bubble hit. They all agreed that my land is worth $13,700 but worth $39,500 with the structures. The 10 acres behind me is listed as worth $29,800 an $166K with the house. He has a nice house. Both seem about right to me. I know mine will sell for that even if that is twice what land sells for per acre, 2 mile over the state line.
Here is mine if ya want to look at it. (if the link works)

http://qpublic7.qpublic.net/ga_display.php?county=ga_dade&KEY=008 00 143 00

An as you can see it still is homestead exempted. Not shown but it also has an exemption for one of the named owners being over 65 which means we dont pay the school tax any more. I voted down that exemption when it was voted on but it passed anyway so.... There is another exemption we have but I don't remember what it was for. Took 10 minutes at the assessors office to cut our $300 tax bill to under $30.

Homestead exemption did not go anywhere. It was not funded 2 years ago, partially funded last year an as I understand it, fully funded this year.

 

[chickened]

Oregon does have a timber tax also, you pay based on stumpage harvested. It is about $4.00 per MBF (thousand board feet raw log form). Anyone that harvests and sells it pays it. We do have a timber deferral program where your timbered acres are in a tax deferral where you only pay about 10% of your timbered acreage assessed value and as long as you reforest you pay nothing and maintain your status when you harvest.

I will say that here depending on the species and age of your trees timber is valuable. Ihave harvested $65,000 off 2 acres before for a client that thought she had less than $10,000 in timber.

 

[bkreugar]

We have almost 7 acres. About half is a small mountain(large rocky hill). We put 20% down and got a 30 yr mortgage. We are 10 years in. House is about 2500 sq ft. 3 years ago we had the mountain logged. I have a neighbor who inherited his 6 acres when his mother died and he is a retired military guy. He lives in texas and comes up a few times a year. His land is flat and has 2 road access. I think he thinks he is going to plot it up and build a few houses. We had apraoched him about buying the 2 acres next to us. He wasn't interested, didn't even get to talk price.

Anyway He had his logged, and the logger was worried about our shared lines. So we showed him our survey (we have it in a HUGE frame in a hallway as we were a bit proud of being able to stop paying board on my horses). Anyway logger aproached US about logging the mountain. We had been interested, but could find no one before who would do less than 5 acres. Anyway this was at the height of things being BAD here and he gave us a qoute of 5,000.00 for a little more than an acre. I had 2 others give me estimates to be sure i wasn't getting the shaft. His qoute was good , but I then went back and asked him if he would scrape my riding ring(level it a bit) and dig a grave for a old mare I had to have put down. He agreed and both those things added about an hour to the time he was here. Took him a week to do OUR part.

He had a contract we signed before he started and the scraping and hole WERE in the contract. At the end he gave us a cashiers check for 5,000.00 and then a triplicate form for the taxes we had to pay. He was liscensed and totally above board. We did pay taxes on it and it put us VERY close to a line that would have changed our tax status. Since it was in triplicate I am thinking it must have been state and federal taxes but I can't remember. It was still worth it and I was left with a postive experience with THIS logger. Was wary as they have a bad reputation.

 

[speckledhen]

Not just him, no one in Dade as far as I know has ever did that. The state has rules about what can be taxed but how that is enforced is all on the county. Dade as far as I know has never enforced such a thing. I tried to find 48-5-7.5 but can't seem to. Dont have woodland so... Here is the state laws if you want to look though. http://www.lexisnexis.com/hottopics/gacode/default.asp
I may ask the tax commissioner when I go down this week. (tag time)


Just so you know my land has been reassessed more than once in the last few years after the Yankee invasion housing bubble hit. They all agreed that my land is worth $13,700 but worth $39,500 with the structures. The 10 acres behind me is listed as worth $29,800 an $166K with the house. He has a nice house. Both seem about right to me. I know mine will sell for that even if that is twice what land sells for per acre, 2 mile over the state line.
Here is mine if ya want to look at it. (if the link works)

http://qpublic7.qpublic.net/ga_display.php?county=ga_dade&KEY=008 00 143 00

An as you can see it still is homestead exempted. Not shown but it also has an exemption for one of the named owners being over 65 which means we dont pay the school tax any more. I voted down that exemption when it was voted on but it passed anyway so.... There is another exemption we have but I don't remember what it was for. Took 10 minutes at the assessors office to cut our $300 tax bill to under $30.

Homestead exemption did not go anywhere. It was not funded 2 years ago, partially funded last year an as I understand it, fully funded this year.

How you have regular homestead, I have no idea. DH said it was statewide when they dumped that. They removed homestead exemption on houses here two or three years ago. That immediately bumped up the tax on house and 2.22 acres from $297 to $450+ (can't recall exactly, but it was around a 70% increase). The reassessment of the house bumped it up another $150 for this year, plus the $369 on the two lots. Of course, bare land never has had homestead exemption anyway. So, we can't even afford to keep this the way we wanted. We were paying this much property tax way back in suburban Atlanta (Gwinnett County) on a brand new 2000 ft subdivision home in a great school system.

In Fannin County, even when my DH turns 65, we get NO break on school taxes. That was a shocker when we found out, but that is the way it is. I'm sick of it all. When we leave here, we leave Georgia for good. And DH's family was one of the founding families of this state, but we have to live. I wish when we were selling our TN land with partially finished cabin, we had stuck to our guns and kept on looking rather than just settle for something, even if it seemed to be a heck of a deal at the time and appraised for way more than we paid for it (estate sale). It's depressing as heck.


To the OP, I'm really sorry we got off on this tangent. Seems a huge part of owning acreage is what you pay for the taxes. I'm sure the guy who owned that subdivision land he's trying to dump was hit with a HUGE bill and is getting desperate now. I'm just glad it's only 3 acres we have that is adding to our pain and misery. We own that land free and clear and barely have a mortgage on the house now, but DH is a disabled vet living on military pension (forget disability pay-we don't get that) and we barely make it as it is. Our vehicles are from the mid-90's. We don't drink or smoke so no $$$ spent on that stuff and in other ways are very frugal. Now, this.