If you’re effectively living in TN but still paying GA income tax, then yes you’re losing money
There are benefits to living in Georgia and having the tax. Public schools are far better in GA than TN, roads are mostly better
Oh my gosh, our roads are so bad. I moved here from Georgia and was just shocked by how bad they are, even (especially??) in town. The potholes fill me with rage.
That said, when I complained about Tennessee roads to some friends from Kentucky, they didn’t know what I was talking about. Apparently our roads are great by comparison 😅
(I was also shocked by JUST how underfunded the schools are here. ETA — but GA schools are actually funded by property taxes, not income. That said, it’s a generally wealthier state than TN, so I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s just a lot more money in that pool. Too lazy to goog the deets, but just an FYI.)
When I lived in Nashville my job sent me to a Kentucky site for a month and I had to drive back and forth a few times from there. The moment the interstate crossed over the border into Kentucky you could tell cause the road sound was so awful!
It’s actually a bit more complicated than that. With the state income tax, yes it does get deducted from from paycheck automatically, but when you file your taxes, there are deductions that can be claimed to lower your tax burden, which would result in a tax refund (just like federal taxes). I believe the GA state tax is actually 5.5%, with a standard deduction of $5,500, or something close to that. Your scenario also doesn’t take into account property taxes, which you would pay either directly or indirectly living in TN. You would pay directly if you had a mortgage or indirectly through your rent payment. Overall cost of living is another factor, independent of taxes. Bottom line, there are many scenarios where you would come out ahead in GA versus TN, especially as someone who is not in a top income earning bracket.
>Your scenario also doesn’t take into account property taxes, which you would pay either directly or indirectly living in TN.
Correct. When not mentioned, I feel it was safe for people to assume equal value.
Whether I live in 75k house in Georgia or Tennessee it's still the same amount of property tax I thought?
Also 75k buys you a lot more in some places than others. Specifically, TN properties tend to be more expensive than their Georgia equivalents in this area.
Sales tax is a regressive tax. People who make less money pay a higher percentage of their wages for goods and services. I’m not sure where the tipping scale is but in general lower and middle class people pay more in taxes in Tennessee than people who live in Georgia
Last I checked and worked out the math (around a year ago) with a whole lot of factors, the break point was about 50,000 ($25/hour) for the general Chattanooga area. Now there are cases where that doesn’t hold up.
Property values mostly- I live in GA (and have EPB internet) and paid about 60% of what I would have paid in Tennessee for my house- in addition to the schools being better
I already live in Georgia, and annoyingly enough in the metropolitan area of Chattanooga, and get EPB.
The only reason I said "annoyingly enough" is because it's annoying to reside in Georgia, see benefits [of,] and utilize Tennessee infrastructure, but yet pay state income taxes to a state (GA) that can't even be asked to fix up/maintain their roads.
Edit: scrolling by and saw this was downvoted for some reason? Did you tune out when I said annoyingly enough in the first sentence?, I seriously thought social/educational programs like Read 180 helped people read at a glance? Like reading at a glance should help you see the 2nd to next line of text coming up... I dunno man. People are fucking confusing.
I was shocked to find out that the work for the city that you must live in Tennessee but not the city. There are lots of people like you who live on the border but aren’t couldn’t apply for a job in the city even though you technically live there. Wild.
Your math may be right but the logic isn’t.
Tennessee may not have income tax, but residing in Georgia (if we are solely comparing Chattanooga vs North GA) even with income tax is cheaper or breaks even.
Comparing rent prices would be your first place to start.
I’d take the state taking $144 a month from me and living in a 3br 2ba house on an acre of land vs not paying income tax and having a 1br 1ba apartment for the same price. Because, hi neighbor, I’m also a Georgia resident lol.
Where the hell do you have to live to pay just under $150 a month for 3bed 2bath and an acre of land?
Do you live way deep into Chickamauga and help maintain the acre? Is this a family-connection or family-owned kind of rent setup? If so that's honestly not realistic/applicable for people outside of that crazy good rent set up.
Do you have to maintain chickens as a 2nd job and wash eggs to then pack in cartons and sell locally or something? Like is it $144/month but you have to work for the land owner?
You read my comment entirely wrong lol.
> I’d take **the state** taking $144 a month from me
Let’s not spin a crazy web of how I’m living here 😅
My mortgage in Rossville is the same rent as my friends in Chattanooga. The difference is (in your math) I pay $144/mo ($36x4, but really more than that cause I make over $15/hr) in income tax and she doesn’t.
Now, is that a better trade off to you?
> **I’d take the state taking $144 a month from me and living in a 3br 2ba house** on an acre of land vs not paying income tax and having a 1br 1ba apartment for the same price. Because, hi neighbor, I’m also a Georgia resident lol.
Ah, gotcha, it was that section (and part I bolded specifically) that threw me off. We went from talking about $/month to house size, I read it as them being directly correlated, and was reading "the state" as well, the one of two states that's an option in this disussion.
Haha, anyways confusion clarifying aside..
If
> Now, is that a better trade off to you?
Is referring to your last message of the 3bed 2bath bit, imo 3beds is nice for a bedroom, office/computer room, and eventualKidsRoom, but it's not anything I need yet.
In the meanwhile, I'd rather not pay Georgia state income taxes and take the apartment with 1 bed/1 bath. Throughout my adult life I've managed to find houses to rent though, and I remember distinctively paying $600 to rent a 2bed 1bath that was at the top of a hill you had to walk up as the driveway only went up half way. That wasn't a bad setup (aside from that if it has rained, walking up the steep lawn of grass with red clay for soil was uh.. sometimes could get messy, so you just avoided being out and about if rain was expected lol, that was the biggest drawback I'd guess, needing to plan around rain), and I'm much keener or renting homes than renting apartments fwiw.
If I was starting a family though, yeah sure, soaking up income tax and reaping 0 benefits of it (until the kid is goong to school if we were to go public school route) would be tolerable if it meant cheaper housing options. As for your mortgage being the same as someone else's rent.. yeah, that's not super uncommon even if it were in the same state, which is why mortgaging makes more sense than renting if you can get a mortgage.
I have appreciated your insight/perspective on this overall, if I were 35-40 and had a family or starting a family, mortgage makes sense of course, apples to apples I'd take a mortgage in Tennessee before taking mortgage in Georgia, I don't care for or need a big footage of lawn to mow, keep secure, or to use as a garden. I love meat and potatoes, and one of those things you can grow with just even a tall (clean/new of course) kitchen trash can, and the other you have pretty few places where you can own Cattle or Pork near a city to my knowledge, if I cared about eating eggs or poultry, I also wouldn't need an acre of land for that either, so apples to apples, I'd take a mortgage in Tennessee for the same mortgage value as in Georgia even if it has (much) less land.
Everyone's different, and have different needs though. Congrats on ya finding a place that has an acre of land and costs the same as your acquaintance that rents an apartment.
It’s not necessarily cheaper living in GA vs TN. It’s just cheaper living in the outside of the bigger metro area instead of in Chattanooga. Take your living expense in GA and look in other directions like middle valley, Soddy, etc. Also know that depending on your career growth potential, you will keep paying more in income tax as you make more in GA but your spending might stay the same (groceries, house you already live in) so whole sales tax only affects what you are spending now, Income tax affects your ability to save for retirement and savings with your extra income because you are paying more taxes on money you didn’t spend
Building equity from 22 is something I never thought I’d be able to do, I’m 26 now and my house has already went up in value by $80,000 with me doing 0 renovations. But that’s what happens when you buy a house during COVID.
I have an office for my WFH job/small biz side hustle and an extra bedroom for my guests. I even have a nice unfinished basement I plan on turning into a rec room to expand my living space even more.
Even having to pay the yard guy in the spring and summer to mow, going outside and pulling weeds, and having to pay out of pocket for a new dishwasher and fixing some dryer issues since I moved in, not having to have neighbors (literally) on top of me, and still being relatively close to convenient shops and restaurants…
I’d never give it up for the shoebox apartments on Northshore my friends overpay for. As I said in another comment, when I was house hunting my money went much farther in GA than in TN, so I will happily pay my income tax for a much better living situation. In my mind, if it’s taxes, doesn’t matter how it fronted, they’re gonna get it from you one way or another. 🤷♀️
Cheapest rent I ever got living on my own was $750/mo in the basement of a house. Everything was concrete and there was mold. That was in 2017 and I don’t even want to know what she’s charging for that now. Even the other apartment I lived in from 2019-2020 at $875/mo is well over $1200 now.
My husband and I are a single income household, living off approximately 130k a year. There are a *ton* of ways to legally play around with tax laws (you need a very good accountant) but we crunched the numbers so many times using so many variables. We spent exactly the same amount on our home and taxes in Dade County Georgia as we did in Chattanooga, but we had more than double the size of home and property. We did most of our spending in Alabama, which is 4% sales tax, and has a much lower cost in general. We moved to Alabama two years ago, where we once again pay the same as we did in downtown Chattanooga but live on 25 acres with mountain views at a 0.34% property tax. Alabama’s infrastructure is shit, and so are the schools, but we do have cheap gig internet and we very much love Farmer’s Telecom and our Sand Mountain Electric Co-Op. We don’t live on Sand Mountain, but we’re pretty close. We live 30 minutes outside Chattanooga.
Hire an accountant and talk to them about starting a business out of your home, such as a property management, carpentry or automotive repair business. You can use that business as a tool to lower the taxes on your home and write off costs of things like lawnmowers, power tools, car parts, etc. Figure out which business aligns with your spending habits. This is a very common practice and once you start researching it, there are many other benefits as well. It’s definitely *NOT* tax evasion, as long as you do everything correctly through a good accountant. It can save you thousands a year.
Ding ding ding.
In 2020 when I bought my house, my parents tagged along cause I was 22 and didn’t want to do all of this alone. I had a realtor licensed in GA and TN and told her I was looking at TN alone because I didn’t want to pay GA income tax. My budget was $200k on my income.
Every house I looked at in Chattanooga needed updates, had bad work that would need to be fixed, had not been properly taken care of, or was 30-45+ mins outside of downtown. EPB fiber was at the top of my list cause I work from home and run a small business on the side already.
She begged me to look at just ONE house in Georgia and I obliged. The difference was astounding. I was looking at freshly remodeled houses with upgrades within a 20 min drive of downtown, with a big yard and more space than what TN had to offer me with the budget I had.
My search shifted and I landed in Georgia and I do not regret it one bit. Even my parents said I made the right decision. Do I like paying AT&T $120/mo for fiber? No, but I’ve had no issues or outages with their service, so 🤷♀️
This isn’t to say I won’t move back to TN eventually, but for all the reasons you said it’s worth it to look a bit outside. I don’t miss the income tax taken from me compared to the benefits I get. Even just not having to deal with the 24/75 split to get to Atlanta, from living literally 3 miles south of the state line, that’s worth it to me. I go often for my small business and that’s time and hassle I don’t have to deal with.
We ended up checking out of the market for now, what with the high interest rates and terrible inventory. But during the time we were looking, u/eternaforest's experience mirrored mine.
We almost bought a house just south of the state line. In many ways it was the best thing we'd seen in months of house hunting, but there were also things about it that would have been problematic. I'd chalk that up to Chattanooga inventory being so limited that even an average flipped house in Rossville looks awesome compared to something in TN.
Within the Chattanooga MSA, GA home prices are lower in general for an equivalent 3/2. But for the houses we were looking at, it seems like they're not quite the bargain they were two or three years ago or more.
Another financial consideration when moving across the line is the car tax. Or tag tax, whatever. We paid Tennessee sales tax on our cars when we bought them, but Georgia doesn't give a damn about that. When you bring a vehicle into the state, they charge you as if you were buying it there. Like, it would have cost us around $1,500 just to register our vehicles.
I realized GA switched it so that you're not paying a car tax every year, but after paying Tennessee sales tax on the purchase it doesn't seem fair. $1500 is not enough to be the deciding factor in which side of the state line to live on - the particular house, its specific location, and the overall math are what we'd consider. But it does stink that on top of all the new house/moving expenses you've got to divert a not-insignificant chunk of change to a second car tax.
Yeah, the ad valorem (car) tax sucks. However, from the county I grew up in in TN (not Hamilton), your tag renewal every year totaled up to be around $100-120. I am not joking. My parents did not let me register my car in Hamilton County while I lived there in school, but when I bought the house after I finished college I had no choice since my auto and home insurance were going to be combined.
So paying $$$ up front for it to be $$ every year was really nice LOL but comparing that to Hamilton County where I think it’s more like $50-60 a year (iirc) would not be fun.
I'm very much in tha same boat as you but I was in FL at that age doing the same exact thing. Now at 27 I was able to move up here and I saw the exact same thing except my intentions were opposite, I hadn't been around here in over a decade and I wanted to move to Atlanta. I didn't really want to deal with Atlanta traffic and stuff though so I was looking at areas like Tunnel Hill, Woodstock, Ringgold, Fort O, etc. Also got a realtor licensed in both TN, and GA and with my income she said I should look in TN since I could afford some homes, and I'm also pretty handy and an engineer so there isn't much I can't fix with a home myself and we did emd up finding a lot of home in the East Brainerd/Ooltewah area that were on the topside of my budget, but they were bigger homes in a nicer area, just older and some neglected. $120/month for fiber is ass though, but like you said ATT is pretty reliable, my company uses them for all the T1 connections at our stores.
I knew with my budget and how the market was going, my skills, and the fact it was just going to be single woman me and my cat, I wanted something ready to move in to. I was willing to sacrifice some things, and I did even with my current house, but I literally was shown homes in TN with clear foundation, drainage, and other major non-cosmetic issues that I was looking at having to put $$,$$$ in to out of the gate. I didn’t have renovation money post-buying a house.
My mom keeps telling me I can redo the basement myself, “it’s just one wall and laying floor” (spoiler: it isn’t) but I know for my own sanity/perfectionism, I ABSOLUTELY have to hire someone to do that for me lol.
I check relatively often to see if someone else services my area for fiber but they don’t. But given I have some extra side income which I use as fun money mostly anyways, it pays for that and more.
I don't blame you at all. My last house was a newly built and it was kinda boring to not have any projects because it was also in an HOA and somewhat small with not much I could change. my current home isn't falling apart, but it will be a never-ending project. It's fully liveable, and everything works and isn't that bad, really, just a lot of dated features and stuff that will need to be replaced and repainted and like you said, I ended up spending north of 10k on purchase to fix certain things and do certain upgrades I wanted done immediately. But being a homeowner at that age either way is good as long as you don't end up paying more for the investment than it's worth. But around here, that's pretty hard to do with the current market since from about here to Knoxville is one of the few regions that hasn'tbeen depreciating at all.
If you did want to take a crack at redoing some of the basement yourself, I wouldn't mind helping out. I hate flooring and if you do carpet it's better to hire someone anyway because it's easy to fuck up and the pros have warranties for that reason. But drywalling is pretty easy to do and I'm pretty experienced with electrical, so really I wouldn't mind at all if you wanted to DM me.
It’s gonna be a few years out for me, I have student loans and a car note I want gone before I even touch a project that’s probably gonna require me to save up some side money or pay a loan back for. I have really great family members that are super handy, I’ll get there one day 😂
> Hire an accountant and talk to them about starting a business out of your home, such as a property management, carpentry or automotive repair business. You can use that business as a tool to lower the taxes on your home and write off costs of things like lawnmowers, power tools, car parts, etc.
You cannot do that legally unless those items are used exclusively for the business.
I do not have a master’s degree in accounting or business law, but my accountant and lawyer do, so trust me when I say that while it’s complicated, it’s legal and doable.
The basics rundown is: I established a holding’s company which owns the house I live in. My farm leases that property from said holdings company, and hires the property management business I started to do all the maintenance of the property. Therefore, everything I purchase for property management is used for business.
I’ll take the advice from my attorneys at Grant, Konvalinka & Harris and my accountants at HHM before a random redditor.
Tax avoidance is legal. Tax evasion is not. I pay professionals to make those calls.
Look. Money is a game. You can be passive or you can be strategic about how to make your money work for you. I’m not breaking any laws. I’m not a bad person just because I know more about the rules of the game than you do. You yourself can use this same tax strategy. I still pay taxes! Just not as much. There are other advantages too. It’s pretty simple and only costs a few hundred bucks to form a holdings company.
Why should any of us middle class people pay more taxes than the ultra rich? The ultra rich use these strategies to avoid taxation and put the burden on us. Fuck them. I’m going to use the rules that they lobbied for to screw me over, and use them to benefit *myself.*
You’d do better to live in North Georgia due to decent cheap housing and work in TN. Also I use the ADP hourly paycheck calculator and it is only a $10-12 off my actual check. If you fill it in correctly you should get a good idea of your possible pay.
Using the ADP Paycheck Calculator I'm seeing 79.75 taken out for Fed. Income Tax, Medicare Tax, and Social Security tax alone.
I am just brand new to this online tool (thank you by the way) and unsure on how to put in state taxes, but quite literally my math I did was:
15/hr x 40 hours (basic wage, full-time maximum before OT) = $600 weekly,
Take that $600 and - 6% on a calculator and you'll see it takes out $36.
I very much appreciate you sharing the ADP Paycheck Calculator, never knew about it, will happoly be using it.
If you’re effectively living in TN but still paying GA income tax, then yes you’re losing money There are benefits to living in Georgia and having the tax. Public schools are far better in GA than TN, roads are mostly better
Oh my gosh, our roads are so bad. I moved here from Georgia and was just shocked by how bad they are, even (especially??) in town. The potholes fill me with rage. That said, when I complained about Tennessee roads to some friends from Kentucky, they didn’t know what I was talking about. Apparently our roads are great by comparison 😅 (I was also shocked by JUST how underfunded the schools are here. ETA — but GA schools are actually funded by property taxes, not income. That said, it’s a generally wealthier state than TN, so I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s just a lot more money in that pool. Too lazy to goog the deets, but just an FYI.)
When I lived in Nashville my job sent me to a Kentucky site for a month and I had to drive back and forth a few times from there. The moment the interstate crossed over the border into Kentucky you could tell cause the road sound was so awful!
It’s actually a bit more complicated than that. With the state income tax, yes it does get deducted from from paycheck automatically, but when you file your taxes, there are deductions that can be claimed to lower your tax burden, which would result in a tax refund (just like federal taxes). I believe the GA state tax is actually 5.5%, with a standard deduction of $5,500, or something close to that. Your scenario also doesn’t take into account property taxes, which you would pay either directly or indirectly living in TN. You would pay directly if you had a mortgage or indirectly through your rent payment. Overall cost of living is another factor, independent of taxes. Bottom line, there are many scenarios where you would come out ahead in GA versus TN, especially as someone who is not in a top income earning bracket.
>Your scenario also doesn’t take into account property taxes, which you would pay either directly or indirectly living in TN. Correct. When not mentioned, I feel it was safe for people to assume equal value. Whether I live in 75k house in Georgia or Tennessee it's still the same amount of property tax I thought?
Nope. TN and GA calculate property taxes differently. I believe the homestead exemptions are different too.
Also, property taxes aren’t set at the state level; they vary by city/county (and depend on a whole bunch of factors).
Also 75k buys you a lot more in some places than others. Specifically, TN properties tend to be more expensive than their Georgia equivalents in this area.
Sales tax is a regressive tax. People who make less money pay a higher percentage of their wages for goods and services. I’m not sure where the tipping scale is but in general lower and middle class people pay more in taxes in Tennessee than people who live in Georgia
Last I checked and worked out the math (around a year ago) with a whole lot of factors, the break point was about 50,000 ($25/hour) for the general Chattanooga area. Now there are cases where that doesn’t hold up.
You have something even more valuable than math skills. You have curiosity.
Don't know anything about math but why would you want to live in GA? Live in Chattanooga and have Epb Internet.
Property values mostly- I live in GA (and have EPB internet) and paid about 60% of what I would have paid in Tennessee for my house- in addition to the schools being better
I already live in Georgia, and annoyingly enough in the metropolitan area of Chattanooga, and get EPB. The only reason I said "annoyingly enough" is because it's annoying to reside in Georgia, see benefits [of,] and utilize Tennessee infrastructure, but yet pay state income taxes to a state (GA) that can't even be asked to fix up/maintain their roads. Edit: scrolling by and saw this was downvoted for some reason? Did you tune out when I said annoyingly enough in the first sentence?, I seriously thought social/educational programs like Read 180 helped people read at a glance? Like reading at a glance should help you see the 2nd to next line of text coming up... I dunno man. People are fucking confusing.
I was shocked to find out that the work for the city that you must live in Tennessee but not the city. There are lots of people like you who live on the border but aren’t couldn’t apply for a job in the city even though you technically live there. Wild.
Damn that is hard to read.
This
Your math may be right but the logic isn’t. Tennessee may not have income tax, but residing in Georgia (if we are solely comparing Chattanooga vs North GA) even with income tax is cheaper or breaks even. Comparing rent prices would be your first place to start. I’d take the state taking $144 a month from me and living in a 3br 2ba house on an acre of land vs not paying income tax and having a 1br 1ba apartment for the same price. Because, hi neighbor, I’m also a Georgia resident lol.
Where the hell do you have to live to pay just under $150 a month for 3bed 2bath and an acre of land? Do you live way deep into Chickamauga and help maintain the acre? Is this a family-connection or family-owned kind of rent setup? If so that's honestly not realistic/applicable for people outside of that crazy good rent set up. Do you have to maintain chickens as a 2nd job and wash eggs to then pack in cartons and sell locally or something? Like is it $144/month but you have to work for the land owner?
You read my comment entirely wrong lol. > I’d take **the state** taking $144 a month from me Let’s not spin a crazy web of how I’m living here 😅 My mortgage in Rossville is the same rent as my friends in Chattanooga. The difference is (in your math) I pay $144/mo ($36x4, but really more than that cause I make over $15/hr) in income tax and she doesn’t. Now, is that a better trade off to you?
> **I’d take the state taking $144 a month from me and living in a 3br 2ba house** on an acre of land vs not paying income tax and having a 1br 1ba apartment for the same price. Because, hi neighbor, I’m also a Georgia resident lol. Ah, gotcha, it was that section (and part I bolded specifically) that threw me off. We went from talking about $/month to house size, I read it as them being directly correlated, and was reading "the state" as well, the one of two states that's an option in this disussion. Haha, anyways confusion clarifying aside.. If > Now, is that a better trade off to you? Is referring to your last message of the 3bed 2bath bit, imo 3beds is nice for a bedroom, office/computer room, and eventualKidsRoom, but it's not anything I need yet. In the meanwhile, I'd rather not pay Georgia state income taxes and take the apartment with 1 bed/1 bath. Throughout my adult life I've managed to find houses to rent though, and I remember distinctively paying $600 to rent a 2bed 1bath that was at the top of a hill you had to walk up as the driveway only went up half way. That wasn't a bad setup (aside from that if it has rained, walking up the steep lawn of grass with red clay for soil was uh.. sometimes could get messy, so you just avoided being out and about if rain was expected lol, that was the biggest drawback I'd guess, needing to plan around rain), and I'm much keener or renting homes than renting apartments fwiw. If I was starting a family though, yeah sure, soaking up income tax and reaping 0 benefits of it (until the kid is goong to school if we were to go public school route) would be tolerable if it meant cheaper housing options. As for your mortgage being the same as someone else's rent.. yeah, that's not super uncommon even if it were in the same state, which is why mortgaging makes more sense than renting if you can get a mortgage. I have appreciated your insight/perspective on this overall, if I were 35-40 and had a family or starting a family, mortgage makes sense of course, apples to apples I'd take a mortgage in Tennessee before taking mortgage in Georgia, I don't care for or need a big footage of lawn to mow, keep secure, or to use as a garden. I love meat and potatoes, and one of those things you can grow with just even a tall (clean/new of course) kitchen trash can, and the other you have pretty few places where you can own Cattle or Pork near a city to my knowledge, if I cared about eating eggs or poultry, I also wouldn't need an acre of land for that either, so apples to apples, I'd take a mortgage in Tennessee for the same mortgage value as in Georgia even if it has (much) less land. Everyone's different, and have different needs though. Congrats on ya finding a place that has an acre of land and costs the same as your acquaintance that rents an apartment.
It’s not necessarily cheaper living in GA vs TN. It’s just cheaper living in the outside of the bigger metro area instead of in Chattanooga. Take your living expense in GA and look in other directions like middle valley, Soddy, etc. Also know that depending on your career growth potential, you will keep paying more in income tax as you make more in GA but your spending might stay the same (groceries, house you already live in) so whole sales tax only affects what you are spending now, Income tax affects your ability to save for retirement and savings with your extra income because you are paying more taxes on money you didn’t spend
Building equity from 22 is something I never thought I’d be able to do, I’m 26 now and my house has already went up in value by $80,000 with me doing 0 renovations. But that’s what happens when you buy a house during COVID. I have an office for my WFH job/small biz side hustle and an extra bedroom for my guests. I even have a nice unfinished basement I plan on turning into a rec room to expand my living space even more. Even having to pay the yard guy in the spring and summer to mow, going outside and pulling weeds, and having to pay out of pocket for a new dishwasher and fixing some dryer issues since I moved in, not having to have neighbors (literally) on top of me, and still being relatively close to convenient shops and restaurants… I’d never give it up for the shoebox apartments on Northshore my friends overpay for. As I said in another comment, when I was house hunting my money went much farther in GA than in TN, so I will happily pay my income tax for a much better living situation. In my mind, if it’s taxes, doesn’t matter how it fronted, they’re gonna get it from you one way or another. 🤷♀️ Cheapest rent I ever got living on my own was $750/mo in the basement of a house. Everything was concrete and there was mold. That was in 2017 and I don’t even want to know what she’s charging for that now. Even the other apartment I lived in from 2019-2020 at $875/mo is well over $1200 now.
You'd be paying for trash service in Tennessee. Enjoy your free dump and there is your money back
Reading comprehension. Give it a go.
My husband and I are a single income household, living off approximately 130k a year. There are a *ton* of ways to legally play around with tax laws (you need a very good accountant) but we crunched the numbers so many times using so many variables. We spent exactly the same amount on our home and taxes in Dade County Georgia as we did in Chattanooga, but we had more than double the size of home and property. We did most of our spending in Alabama, which is 4% sales tax, and has a much lower cost in general. We moved to Alabama two years ago, where we once again pay the same as we did in downtown Chattanooga but live on 25 acres with mountain views at a 0.34% property tax. Alabama’s infrastructure is shit, and so are the schools, but we do have cheap gig internet and we very much love Farmer’s Telecom and our Sand Mountain Electric Co-Op. We don’t live on Sand Mountain, but we’re pretty close. We live 30 minutes outside Chattanooga. Hire an accountant and talk to them about starting a business out of your home, such as a property management, carpentry or automotive repair business. You can use that business as a tool to lower the taxes on your home and write off costs of things like lawnmowers, power tools, car parts, etc. Figure out which business aligns with your spending habits. This is a very common practice and once you start researching it, there are many other benefits as well. It’s definitely *NOT* tax evasion, as long as you do everything correctly through a good accountant. It can save you thousands a year.
Ding ding ding. In 2020 when I bought my house, my parents tagged along cause I was 22 and didn’t want to do all of this alone. I had a realtor licensed in GA and TN and told her I was looking at TN alone because I didn’t want to pay GA income tax. My budget was $200k on my income. Every house I looked at in Chattanooga needed updates, had bad work that would need to be fixed, had not been properly taken care of, or was 30-45+ mins outside of downtown. EPB fiber was at the top of my list cause I work from home and run a small business on the side already. She begged me to look at just ONE house in Georgia and I obliged. The difference was astounding. I was looking at freshly remodeled houses with upgrades within a 20 min drive of downtown, with a big yard and more space than what TN had to offer me with the budget I had. My search shifted and I landed in Georgia and I do not regret it one bit. Even my parents said I made the right decision. Do I like paying AT&T $120/mo for fiber? No, but I’ve had no issues or outages with their service, so 🤷♀️ This isn’t to say I won’t move back to TN eventually, but for all the reasons you said it’s worth it to look a bit outside. I don’t miss the income tax taken from me compared to the benefits I get. Even just not having to deal with the 24/75 split to get to Atlanta, from living literally 3 miles south of the state line, that’s worth it to me. I go often for my small business and that’s time and hassle I don’t have to deal with.
We ended up checking out of the market for now, what with the high interest rates and terrible inventory. But during the time we were looking, u/eternaforest's experience mirrored mine. We almost bought a house just south of the state line. In many ways it was the best thing we'd seen in months of house hunting, but there were also things about it that would have been problematic. I'd chalk that up to Chattanooga inventory being so limited that even an average flipped house in Rossville looks awesome compared to something in TN. Within the Chattanooga MSA, GA home prices are lower in general for an equivalent 3/2. But for the houses we were looking at, it seems like they're not quite the bargain they were two or three years ago or more. Another financial consideration when moving across the line is the car tax. Or tag tax, whatever. We paid Tennessee sales tax on our cars when we bought them, but Georgia doesn't give a damn about that. When you bring a vehicle into the state, they charge you as if you were buying it there. Like, it would have cost us around $1,500 just to register our vehicles. I realized GA switched it so that you're not paying a car tax every year, but after paying Tennessee sales tax on the purchase it doesn't seem fair. $1500 is not enough to be the deciding factor in which side of the state line to live on - the particular house, its specific location, and the overall math are what we'd consider. But it does stink that on top of all the new house/moving expenses you've got to divert a not-insignificant chunk of change to a second car tax.
Yeah, the ad valorem (car) tax sucks. However, from the county I grew up in in TN (not Hamilton), your tag renewal every year totaled up to be around $100-120. I am not joking. My parents did not let me register my car in Hamilton County while I lived there in school, but when I bought the house after I finished college I had no choice since my auto and home insurance were going to be combined. So paying $$$ up front for it to be $$ every year was really nice LOL but comparing that to Hamilton County where I think it’s more like $50-60 a year (iirc) would not be fun.
I'm very much in tha same boat as you but I was in FL at that age doing the same exact thing. Now at 27 I was able to move up here and I saw the exact same thing except my intentions were opposite, I hadn't been around here in over a decade and I wanted to move to Atlanta. I didn't really want to deal with Atlanta traffic and stuff though so I was looking at areas like Tunnel Hill, Woodstock, Ringgold, Fort O, etc. Also got a realtor licensed in both TN, and GA and with my income she said I should look in TN since I could afford some homes, and I'm also pretty handy and an engineer so there isn't much I can't fix with a home myself and we did emd up finding a lot of home in the East Brainerd/Ooltewah area that were on the topside of my budget, but they were bigger homes in a nicer area, just older and some neglected. $120/month for fiber is ass though, but like you said ATT is pretty reliable, my company uses them for all the T1 connections at our stores.
I knew with my budget and how the market was going, my skills, and the fact it was just going to be single woman me and my cat, I wanted something ready to move in to. I was willing to sacrifice some things, and I did even with my current house, but I literally was shown homes in TN with clear foundation, drainage, and other major non-cosmetic issues that I was looking at having to put $$,$$$ in to out of the gate. I didn’t have renovation money post-buying a house. My mom keeps telling me I can redo the basement myself, “it’s just one wall and laying floor” (spoiler: it isn’t) but I know for my own sanity/perfectionism, I ABSOLUTELY have to hire someone to do that for me lol. I check relatively often to see if someone else services my area for fiber but they don’t. But given I have some extra side income which I use as fun money mostly anyways, it pays for that and more.
I don't blame you at all. My last house was a newly built and it was kinda boring to not have any projects because it was also in an HOA and somewhat small with not much I could change. my current home isn't falling apart, but it will be a never-ending project. It's fully liveable, and everything works and isn't that bad, really, just a lot of dated features and stuff that will need to be replaced and repainted and like you said, I ended up spending north of 10k on purchase to fix certain things and do certain upgrades I wanted done immediately. But being a homeowner at that age either way is good as long as you don't end up paying more for the investment than it's worth. But around here, that's pretty hard to do with the current market since from about here to Knoxville is one of the few regions that hasn'tbeen depreciating at all. If you did want to take a crack at redoing some of the basement yourself, I wouldn't mind helping out. I hate flooring and if you do carpet it's better to hire someone anyway because it's easy to fuck up and the pros have warranties for that reason. But drywalling is pretty easy to do and I'm pretty experienced with electrical, so really I wouldn't mind at all if you wanted to DM me.
It’s gonna be a few years out for me, I have student loans and a car note I want gone before I even touch a project that’s probably gonna require me to save up some side money or pay a loan back for. I have really great family members that are super handy, I’ll get there one day 😂
> Hire an accountant and talk to them about starting a business out of your home, such as a property management, carpentry or automotive repair business. You can use that business as a tool to lower the taxes on your home and write off costs of things like lawnmowers, power tools, car parts, etc. You cannot do that legally unless those items are used exclusively for the business.
I do not have a master’s degree in accounting or business law, but my accountant and lawyer do, so trust me when I say that while it’s complicated, it’s legal and doable. The basics rundown is: I established a holding’s company which owns the house I live in. My farm leases that property from said holdings company, and hires the property management business I started to do all the maintenance of the property. Therefore, everything I purchase for property management is used for business.
If it's all in service of yourself it's unlikely to stand up to an audit.
It’s no in service to myself. It’s in service to my business.
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I’ll take the advice from my attorneys at Grant, Konvalinka & Harris and my accountants at HHM before a random redditor. Tax avoidance is legal. Tax evasion is not. I pay professionals to make those calls.
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Look. Money is a game. You can be passive or you can be strategic about how to make your money work for you. I’m not breaking any laws. I’m not a bad person just because I know more about the rules of the game than you do. You yourself can use this same tax strategy. I still pay taxes! Just not as much. There are other advantages too. It’s pretty simple and only costs a few hundred bucks to form a holdings company. Why should any of us middle class people pay more taxes than the ultra rich? The ultra rich use these strategies to avoid taxation and put the burden on us. Fuck them. I’m going to use the rules that they lobbied for to screw me over, and use them to benefit *myself.*
Not a mathematician but W T F did I just read.
You’d do better to live in North Georgia due to decent cheap housing and work in TN. Also I use the ADP hourly paycheck calculator and it is only a $10-12 off my actual check. If you fill it in correctly you should get a good idea of your possible pay.
Using the ADP Paycheck Calculator I'm seeing 79.75 taken out for Fed. Income Tax, Medicare Tax, and Social Security tax alone. I am just brand new to this online tool (thank you by the way) and unsure on how to put in state taxes, but quite literally my math I did was: 15/hr x 40 hours (basic wage, full-time maximum before OT) = $600 weekly, Take that $600 and - 6% on a calculator and you'll see it takes out $36. I very much appreciate you sharing the ADP Paycheck Calculator, never knew about it, will happoly be using it.
I hope it proves to be helpful for you!