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Britt Erica Tunick is an award winning financial journalist who has spent the past 17 years writing about virtually every aspect of finance. She has mastered the art of boiling down complicated financial topics for readers to understand. |
A Homeowners Rebate program is used as a way of providing property owners a bit of tax relief by either exempting a portion of the taxes they owe. What is the Homeowners Rebate? By Britt Erica Tunick If you own a home, odds are at that at some point in time you’ve received an application in the mail for a potential tax break offered by the state in which you reside. Known as either homeowners or homestead rebates, these relief programs are used by many states as a way of providing property owners a bit of tax relief by either exempting a portion of the taxes they owe for their property, or by refunding a portion of the money already paid in property taxes that year. Unfortunately, such tax breaks are not necessarily available to everyone who receives these applications. While those eligible for such rebates vary from state to state, the main target groups of these programs are usually the elderly, moderate and low income homeowners and veterans. And the programs are not uniformly available in all 50 states. For example, while New Jersey currently offers a homestead rebate, nearby Connecticut does not. There is no central database for homeowner rebates nationwide. To find out if such a program is available to you log on to the home page for your state’s division of taxation and do a search for homestead or homeowners rebate programs. And, since most applications literally consist of a handful of questions, if you are at all unsure about whether you qualify the best bet is to fill in the application and send it in. Best case scenario, you’ll either receive a refund check in the mail, though most states now just apply a discount to a future tax payment, resulting in a lower tax bill one quarter of the year. If you know that you live in a state that offers such a program and that you do qualify it is important to know that most of these rebates are attached specifically to the property you reside at, not necessarily you as an individual. That means that if you are thinking of moving and are entitled to a refund you’ll want to do your homework and find out when such breaks are credited to a property’s taxesin case there is any possibility of timing the sale of your house to ensure you reap the benefit. |
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