doing your homework becomes powerful. You might discover a town with great schools, lower taxes, and the same or better home values than where you currently live.
Infrastructure and Age of the Town
Older towns often have older roads, older sewer systems, older municipal buildings, and older schools. Maintenance costs rise over time. If the town does not have outside revenue sources, taxes can rise significantly to cover ongoing needs. On the other hand, towns that developed more recently often have more modern infrastructure, well planned layouts, newer schools, and lower maintenance costs. This does not mean older towns are bad. Many are beautiful, historic, walkable, and extremely desirable. But their charm sometimes comes with higher taxes because upkeep requires money.
How Property Taxes Are Calculated in New Jersey
In New Jersey, property taxes are not based directly on what your home would sell for today. Instead, each town assigns an assessed value to your home and applies its local tax rate to that number. This is how your annual tax bill is calculated. Because many towns reassess properties at different times, assessed values can be very different from current market values. That is why two similar homes in different towns, or even on the same street, can have very different tax bills. To better understand the real cost of property taxes, many homeowners look at the effective tax rate. This simply compares what you pay in taxes each year to what your home is actually worth today. It is often the most useful way to compare towns
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