#Texas personal property tax

[oconnor2023]

There are a series of elements to defining market value which we will discuss. However, the accounting calculations for depreciation have never been intended to be a reliable indicator of market value by the IRS or business. To know more about Personal Property Taxes visit:- https://www.poconnor.com/why-is-personal-property-valued/

[oconnorassociate]

How To Protest Property Taxes - O'Connor

Being charged more in taxes for not protesting yearly? This is true, and there are many ways to avoid this. Visit https://www.poconnor.com/how-to-protest-property-taxes/ to know how.

[1zashreena1]

Real life shit underneath

I am afraid.

I am fearful of so many things right now.

My parents' health is failing at a slowly but ever more increasing rate and I am literally a thousand miles away. I had a not so great relationship with my mother growing up, but ever since she went thru menopause we've been on the mend. But because I'm the youngest child and they were older than was typical when they had me, I have less time with them to begin with. I fear that something drastic will happen with the limited time of good standing I have with my parents and I won't physically see them again before they die.

In order to move closer to them I am trying to get my partner a job at my employer, where there are still fully remote positions. Partner's current job requires in office and is only located here in Florida, Texas, and Georgia. Obviously I'm not moving from 1 dumpster fire to another, so partner jumping ship from his job is really the only option. However, I have heard nothing from my HR dept and there's not much else I can do about it.

I worry myself into being so nauseous that I can't even eat over the imminent political future here in the US. I have fought my entire life to be a person with human rights under the law (and I do mean my whole life, I've been politically active since like age 12, and no my parents did not usher me into this as they do not share many of my beliefs) and I'm tired. I'm just so tired. After being in healthcare thru covid, I'm just. Exhausted. I fear that I will lose access to hormonal birth control that I need for my incredibly severe pmdd, and then lose the right to work, to own property and assets, to lose ownership of myself entirely. That level of all-encompassing fear will eat you alive from the inside out.

My other furbaby is sick with something respiratory and, just like with Allover, I can't turn off the mental terror. Kimi is not in acute distress, but I'm scared to go to sleep because what if something happens and I don't wake up. If I can't help her and she dies. I don't think I could live with myself.

I'm starting to feel like all I am is just an ever shrinking ball of angst.

Pet tax pic as a thank you for reading this mess:

My babydoll Kimi

[half-as-big-as-life]

Okay, I have to ask about "The law & daniel molloy"

YIPPEE!!! Law & daniel molloy is my baby

There's 2 universes of it right now. Both are the same premise, but the minor characters are different. All human AU.

The Law & Daniel Molloy is a crossover with one of my favorite tv shows, The Law & Harry McGraw, which itself is a spinoff of Murder, She Wrote. Harry was in 6 episodes of MSW iirc, and the spinoff had 16 episodes before it was canceled.

The show revolves around Harry, who is a private investigator in boston. His closest friend works across the hall from him in the same building, a defense attorney named Eleanor Maginnis. Harry is kind of uncouth, but nice. Ellie is fancy. You wouldn't expect them to be as close as they are from appearances/personality alone.

Ellie's husband, Matt, died two years before the last episode, and the timeline is in spinoff hell because why wouldn't it be. Harry was an alcoholic and Matt, before he died, was the one who got Harry to attend AA.

Next is Harry's niece, EJ. She works for him as his assistant. Ellie's nephew Steve works for Ellie, and he's a tax lawyer.

There's other characters, like Cookie. He is the bartender at the bar/restaurant Harry loves. Everyone else thinks the food is bad except Harry.

As well as that, there is Tyler Chase, a district attorney, who hates Harry and is in love with Eleanor. He is... something. AND he was played by Peter Haskell, the guy from the Chucky movies, I guess.

I swear, all these characters are relevant.

PART 2: CHARACTERS

Daniel takes the role of Harry, and Armand of Ellie, and Marius of Matt. I've changed my mind about EJ and Steve, I think Sybelle may be EJ and Antoine be Steve.

Thorne is Cookie. That's not truly important but it is a silly little thing and why I mentioned Cookie at all. Yippee! Thorne!

And David as Tyler Chase.

PART 3: THE AUS THEMSELVES

Section 1

Like I said, there are 2 AUs. One is of an episode of the show, the other is the ACTUAL AU.

The one that is just an actual episode of the show is the last episode, Maginnis for the People, in which Ellie is upset when her friend is accused of murdering her (the friend's) husband, and hires some famous fuck from texas instead of her (Ellie).

In this AU, which I've called De Romanus for the People, the plot is the same.

Armand's work has been slow lately

He goes to a dinner party held by Louis and Lestat, David is there, as well as Madeleine. There's others who do not matter, perhaps

David asks (read: begs) Armand to work for him, and he denies

After the dinner party, the last person leaves (Madeleine), and Louis closes the gate and sets the alarm (the housekeeper is off for the night)

The next morning, the housekeeper comes in and finds Lestat dead, an apparent suicide. Louis is upset and confused, and people are acting very strange about him

They think Louis killed his husband! But he didn't :(

Daniel and Armand go to Louis, so Armand can talk to him. Armand comforts him a bit, until Louis gets a call. Its revealed that he'd already hired Raglan James as his attorney, and didn't need Armand for it

Daniel asks housekeeper about it all (im thinking the housekeeper may be Babette, either way doesn't matter) and learns that the marriage wasn't doing too good. Separate bedrooms, Louis having a possible affair. But the weird thing is? The alarm was off when Babette got there that morning...

David has Daniel thrown off the property, and Armand is here now and FREAKING OUT! Angrily agrees to lunch w David, that he may go to work there

Of all people, Louis hired that bitch Raglan James! Instead of Armand! His friend of many YEARS!

Speedrun of the next bits:

James asks Daniel to work for him, and eventually Daniel agrees, but James tries to get him to pay off a witness. He thinks Louis is guilty. Daniel and Armand fight over his working for James. Armand has lunch w David; Claudia and Madeleine meet for the first time. He really does go to work for David but HATES it. Quits. Daniel quits working for James, too. Louis shows up, hears that Armand thinks he's innocent, and him and Armand make up.

Eventually some things happen and the killer is revealed. I won't spoil it all. But the bad guy gets arrested and everything is OK.

Section 2

This AU is not based on an episode, just the premise of the show itself. It involves Louis and Lestat, with the murder of their daughter and trying to figure out who did it. There's less thought put into this one so far, but it's more important, as it's the actual canon for tL&DM

CONCLUSION

De Romanus for the People is NOT canon to the real lore, just kinda fun

If you made it to the end WOW cause I have typed far too many words here and I apologize. Passionate soul and all that

If you have lore questions feel free to ask because I am actually insane about the show + this AU

[drst]

May 16, 2024 (Thursday)

Seventy years ago, on May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. That landmark decision declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional.

Brown v. Board was a turning point in American history.

It established that the U.S. government would, once and for all, use the Fourteenth Amendment to protect American citizens from discriminatory legislation written by state legislatures.

Added to the Constitution in 1868, in the wake of the Civil War, as southern state legislatures were writing laws that made Black Americans subservient to white Americans, the Fourteenth Amendment asserted that the federal government could, and must, stop such discrimination. It established that “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” It gave Congress the power to enforce the amendment.

In the late nineteenth century, the Supreme Court nodded to racial segregation in the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision, getting around the Fourteenth Amendment by asserting that separate accommodations were fine, so long as they were “equal.” But in 1954 a unanimous court under Chief Justice Earl Warren, who had previously been the Republican governor of California, ruled that racial segregation established by state law in public schools denied to Black children the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment.

“Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal,” it wrote.

Just two weeks before it decided Brown v. Board, the Supreme Court had decided Hernandez v. Texas, which established that not only Black Americans, but also Mexican Americans and all other nationality groups, were entitled to equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment.

Over the following decades, the Supreme Court used the Fourteenth Amendment to strike down state laws against interracial marriage and gay marriage, and to establish equal rights for women, including the right to abortion. It also ruled the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, constitutional.

That new legal framework, embodied in Brown v. Board, both established the equal rights that were central to the modern era and sparked a backlash against them.

The federal requirement that states desegregate their public schools spurred southern state legislatures to pass laws and resolutions to block or postpone desegregation. In 1956, ninety-nine congressmen, led by South Carolina Democrat Strom Thurmond, wrote the “Declaration of Constitutional Principles,” quickly dubbed the Southern Manifesto, denouncing desegregation as unconstitutional.

Lawmakers also found ways to transfer tax dollars to private schools, which were not covered by the Supreme Court’s decision. Attendance at so-called segregation academies exploded. By 1958, more than 250,000 students had migrated to segregation academies, a number that jumped to a million by 1965.

Those opposed to racial equality made common cause with those businessmen determined to get rid of federal regulation of business. In 1955, William F. Buckley Jr., the son of an oilman, started National Review, a periodical that promised to stand against an active government that protected labor and regulated business. Buckley said he would tell the “violated businessman’s side of the story.”

In National Review, Buckley gave Virginia newspaper editor James Kilpatrick a platform to assure readers that desegregation challenged American values. Black Americans had no right to the equality declared unanimously by the Supreme Court, Kilpatrick wrote. Rather, the white community had an established right “to peace and tranquillity [sic]; the right to freedom from tumult and lawlessness.” Desegregation would lead to bloody violence, he promised, implying that Black Americans would rage and riot, although, in fact, it was the white community that was attacking Black Americans.

In 1964, Arizona senator Barry Goldwater brought these two themes to his presidential campaign. He stood firm on the idea that the federal government had no business either regulating business or protecting equality. In The Conscience of a Conservative, published under his name in 1960, Goldwater asserted that the federal government had no power over schools at all and certainly could not order them to desegregate.

Goldwater accepted the Republican presidential nomination in July 1964, less than a month after three civil rights workers registering Black Americans to vote had disappeared in Mississippi. Goldwater told his cheering supporters: “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, and…moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” Strom Thurmond publicly announced that he would vote for Goldwater.

Goldwater lost in a landslide, but his loss fed the backlash against federal protection of equality, especially after Congress passed the 1965 Voting Rights Act to expand Black and Brown voting, moving many of those voters into the Democrats’ camp. In 1968, Republican Richard Nixon courted Thurmond and white southerners with a promise to slow down desegregation and a defense of state’s rights. The so-called Southern Strategy moved the former Dixiecrats to the Republican Party.

Religious traditionalists, particularly those among the Southern Baptist Convention, also opposed the federal government’s support for equality, although they got less press in the early years of that expansion. In their view, the Bible laid out hierarchical social arrangements, especially patriarchy. Government defense of women’s equality was a direct assault on their worldview.

When he ran for the presidency in 1980, former California governor Ronald Reagan courted those religious traditionalists, and in 1985 his people made them a key part of the Republican coalition. Americans for Tax Reform brought together big business, evangelicals, and social conservatives under the leadership of Grover Norquist, who had been an economist for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. “Traditional Republican business groups can provide the resources,” Norquist explained, “but these groups can provide the votes.”

In the following decades, Republican leaders used racist and traditionalist dislike of equal rights to turn out voters who would let them put their economic policies—cuts to taxes and deregulation of business—into place. But those opposed to equal rights found themselves out of step with a majority of voters and unable to get their policies enshrined into law as courts continued to uphold equal rights for racial and ethnic minorities, LGBTQ+ individuals, and women.

The backlash against the federal protection of equal rights based on the Fourteenth Amendment entered a new era with the election of Donald Trump. In contrast to his predecessors, Trump let the racist and sexist voter base of the party drive policy. White evangelicals, especially, found in Trump an answer to their frustration at being sidelined by the courts and a majority of American voters.

Despite his own lack of personal virtue, Trump was willing to smash through the laws and court decisions that had supported equality since the 1950s, offering to center the country on traditional religion and racial hierarchies in exchange for power. Under him, traditionalists saw the courts stacked with extremists who would prioritize their evangelical faith across society, including by ending the federal protection of abortion rights.

Their fight to return Trump to power is part of their fight to establish traditional religion, rather than the equality promised in the Fourteenth Amendment, as the nation’s fundamental law. As Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows wrote to Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, as they plotted to overturn the decision of voters in 2020 to reject Trump: “This is a fight of good versus evil. Evil always looks like the victor until the King of Kings triumphs. Do not grow weary in well doing. The fight continues. I have staked my career on it.”

Today, almost exactly seventy years to the day after Brown v. Board ushered in a new era of equality and democracy in the United States, MAGA Republican lawmakers Andy Biggs (R-AZ), Lauren Boebert (R-CO), Michael Cloud (R-TX), Eli Crane (R-AZ), Matt Gaetz (R-FL), Bob Good (R-VA), Diana Harshbarger (R-TN), Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL), Ralph Norman (R-SC), and Andy Ogles (R-TN) traveled to Manhattan to stand with Trump at his criminal trial for falsifying business records to interfere in an election. The lawmakers made it clear that their determination to control the country has made them give up not only on the equality promised in the Declaration of Independence and defended by the Fourteenth Amendment, but also on democracy.

Echoing the promise of the right-wing Proud Boys to Trump before they stormed the U.S. Capitol to install Trump into office despite the will of the voters, Gaetz tweeted: “Standing back and standing by, Mr. President.”

--Heather Cox Richardson. May 17, 2024

[follow-up-news]

Alex Jones’ personal spending is frustrating families who are trying to collect on the $1.5 billion in judgments against him for calling the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school shooting a hoax. The conspiracy theorist and Infowars host has been paying his own wife, Erika Wulff Jones, $15,000 a month, according to the most recent spending report he filed in his bankruptcy case — payouts called “fraudulent transfers” by lawyers for some of the shooting victims’ families. Jones says they’re required under a prenuptial agreement. In July, Jones spent $7,900 on housekeeping. He dished out more than $6,300 for meals and entertainment, not including groceries, which totaled nearly $3,400 — or roughly $850 per week. A second home, his Texas lake house, cost him nearly $6,700 that month, including maintenance and property taxes, while his vehicles and boats sapped another $5,600, including insurance, maintenance and fuel. His total personal expenses for July topped $93,000, up from nearly $75,000 in April, not including legal fees and other costs for his court cases, according to bankruptcy filings. “It is disturbing that Alex Jones continues to spend money on excessive household expenditures and his extravagant lifestyle when that money rightfully belongs to the families he spent years tormenting,” said Christopher Mattei, a Connecticut lawyer for the families. “The families are increasingly concerned and will continue to contest these matters in court.” In an Aug. 29 court filing, the lawyers for the families said that if Jones doesn’t reduce his personal expenses to a “reasonable” level, they will ask the judge to bar him from “further waste of estate assets,” appoint a trustee to oversee his spending, or dismiss the bankruptcy case.

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

Herschel Walker has been accused of committing "election fraud" following reports he received a primary residence tax exemption for his home in Dallas, Texas, whilst running for the Senate in Georgia.

Walker faces Democratic incumbent Raphael Warnock in a runoff election on December 6, after neither candidate won an absolute majority of the vote in the initial poll on November 8.

Analysis of tax records by CNN showed Walker got a homestead tax exemption for a property in Dallas this year, saving him around $1,500.

Under Texan law the exemption is only valid on a person's "principal residence."

This was claimed despite Walker registering to vote in Georgia in 2021, ahead of his Senate bid.

According to the 2020 Georgia code, residence of the state can be rescinded if an individual moves to another state "with the intention of making it such person's residence."

It adds: "If a person removes to another state with the intention of remaining there an indefinite time and making such state such person's place of residence, such person shall be considered to have lost such person's residence in this state."

Arguably by listing a property in Dallas as his "principal residence" Walker made the property his "place of residence" under Georgia state law.

Speaking to CNN a tax official from Tarrant County, where Walker's Dallas home is located, confirmed the former NFL running back claimed a principal residence tax exemption for the property in both 2021 and 2022.

Newsweek has approached Walker for comment regarding the allegations.

[synoddiane]

Some things I did this March:

Beat Baldur's Gate 3 on Honor Mode

Got real into Balatro

Paid property tax

Guested on an episode of 2Rash2Unadvised

Picked up resized engagement ring

Started playing in a new weird homebrew RPG campaign

Visited the Torpedo Factory

Went to Texas to visit my partner's family

Wrote a short story for a friend

Played Personal Portraits with bash'mates

Got someone who I approve of to join the condo board; avoided rejoining it myself

Went to Artomatic twice

Made sure to be visibly trans for TDOV

Higher steps per day than last month, but just barely (7798 vs. 7773)

Read Necessity (reread), The Unraveling, The Employees, The Past is Red, OKPsyche, and We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Watched Dirty Pair: Project Eden, Street Fighter Alpha: The Animation, and some episodes of Ghost in the Shell: Standalone Complex

[oconnor2023]

Property Tax Protection Program™:-

\You also gain access to tax tips, assistance with exemption questions, as well as alerts to any disaster notices that may allow you to qualify for reduced valuations.

If you have questions about your enrollment, please contact our property tax experts at (713) 290-9700 or (877) 482-9288.

How to Appeal Your Property Taxes:-

It’s your right to challenge the appraisal district “guesstimate of value,

You have a right to lower property taxes! State law prescribes a procedure for protesting the assessed value of your property.

Why O’Connor for Property Tax Reduction?

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Why O’Connor - Greater Protection:-

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[melophobia2013]

[consistantly-changing]

[Image descriptions in order: a tweet by @Saychee... "SAY CHEESE! 👄🧀" Which says "K9 gets praised at Dallas Love Field Airport after catching Chicago woman with more than $100,000 in her luggage. She wasn't arrested but the money was seized." Attached is a photo of a German Shepherd sitting on a wooden desk in an office, behind it a sign which says "Dallas Love Field".

@KuntaJay "Kunta Jay ☮️✌🏿" replies "So y'all robbed her".]

[A screenshot of an article from Reason, which says "Texas law enforcement agencies additionally have a "strong incentive" to seize property, as they are entitled to a significant percentage of the proceeds. In fact, IJ is currently suing Harris County, which encompasses Houston, over its application of the state's asset forfeiture law.

Cops regularly use civil asset forfeiture to boost their own budgets while depriving innocent people of their property. Earlier this year, a Nevada Highway Patrol Officer confiscated a man's life savings during a routine traffic stop, even after admitting that it was "not illegal to carry currency." In Georgia, the state government agency charged with enforcing tax crimes misappropriated more than $5 million in seized funds between 2015 and 2020. And for years in Oklahoma, district attorneys used forfeitures like their own personal piggy banks, living for free in seized houses and paying off student loans with seized cash."]

[jennifermartinyt]

House Hacking for Wealth | #realestateinvesting #realestateinvestors #realestateinvestorlifestyle

House Hacking for Wealth | #realestateinvesting #realestateinvestors #realestateinvestorlifestyle https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdquTwZD1A8 Can you househack only once? How many loans can you get with 5% down? Do you need a big down payment if you buy a second home or investment property? It depends on what you plan to do with it. Reach out to me and I'll help walk you through your options. 👉 Book a Private 1 on 1 Call with ME to learn more: https://ift.tt/p5IMHoV ✅ Subscribe to The Channel Jennifer Martin- South By West Austin Real Estate for real answers in real estate, delivered with the honesty and responsiveness you deserve: https://www.youtube.com/@jenmartinrealtoratx ✅ Stay Connected With Me. 👉 Website: https://ift.tt/BpHusW0 👉 Instagram: https://ift.tt/gZRWjcy 👉 Facebook: https://ift.tt/cXE8xAI 👉 LinkedIn: https://ift.tt/CFkzwU9 👉 TikTok: https://ift.tt/VcLkqRs ✅ For Business Inquiries: jen@martinhomeland.com ============================= ✅ Recommended Playlists: 👉 For your Protection- Get a Home Inspection (or not?): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lVMETmoNNY&list=PLZD2yInsRkGLW4WjNmdlULO7GaaMGQU-y&pp=iAQB 👉 Property Taxes- How to Protest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6EgsRinJyeg&list=PLZD2yInsRkGLc5tj22428mDWouLBBCdmH&pp=iAQB ✅ Other Videos You Might Be Interested In Watching: 👉 Lakeway, TX Fix and Flip! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8j6RGbyE0U 👉 SW Austin Luxury Home Tour $1.25 Million- Granada Hills https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vAhHH4qj3Q 👉 Expert Real Estate Advice for Easy Home Loans https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3HlCMVMaEg 👉 Foundation Inspection with the Guru! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VexHroyg4GU ============================= ✅ About Jennifer Martin- South By West Austin Real Estate. Real answers in Real Estate? -I'm Not Your Typical Realtor. I'm honest and candid. If you need a quick real estate brain or a strong dose of honesty, you’re in the right place. I take pride in being approachable and friendly, and the novel approach of actually giving you what you want — real answers to questions you’re probably wondering right now. Will I return your calls and emails? Yes. Without question. I get dozens of calls and emails daily, and I work hard to reply as quickly as possible. 🏆 Ranked Platinum Top 500 Realtors in Austin year after year 🏆 Ranked Texas Monthly 5-Star Professional in Customer Service 🏆 Austin Board of Realtors Rookie of the Year Nominee 🏆 Austin Business Journal Top Realtors in Austin Nominee 🏆 Ranked Platinum Top 50 Realtors in Austin Nominee For Collaboration and Business inquiries, please use the contact information below: 📩 Email: jen@martinhomeland.com 🔔 Subscribe to The Channel Jennifer Martin- South By West Austin Real Estate for real answers in real estate, delivered with the honesty and responsiveness you deserve: https://www.youtube.com/@jenmartinrealtoratx ================================= #househacking #capitalgainstaxdeferral #capitalgainstaxsolutions #whatishousehacking Disclaimer: I do not accept any liability for any loss or damage which is incurred by you acting or not acting as a result of listening to any of my publications. For all videos on my channel: This information is for general & educational purposes only. Always consult with an attorney, CPA, or financial professional for advice based on your specific situation. Copyright Disclaimer: Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for "fair use" for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational, or personal use tips the balance in favor of fair use © Jennifer Martin- South By West Austin Real Estate. via Living in Austin- with Kids! https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6qyI413G9IaSi0o_MmTQJw November 11, 2024 at 06:00AM

[dankusner]

Spouse's death leads to complexity

Ignore the legal consequences at your peril

Read about what happens legally when your spouse dies.

You have certain rights, such as a homestead right, as a surviving spouse.

These are…

You have certain rights, such as a homestead right, as a surviving spouse.

These are provided by either the Texas Constitution or by statute.

Are you married and residing with your spouse in the great state of Texas?

Then we will launch right into a discussion of what happens legally when your spouse dies.

Your marriage terminates.

Your community property ceases to exist because only spouses can own community property.

Death works a division of the community property assets.

You retain your half of the community assets.

Your spouse’s half-interest in the community assets passes to your spouse’s heirs or devisees.

Note:

It may not be you.

Your spouse’s separate property becomes part of your spouse’s estate.

Your mutual obligation to support each other ends.

You do not have a legal duty to bury your deceased spouse.

Your spouse’s community interest in your state employee’s retirement plan, if you have one, terminates.

You remain personally liable for your debts.

Your spouse’s estate is liable for your spouse’s debts, although a creditor must jump through hoops to recover on the debt.

Those debts are considered a statutory lien on your spouse’s estate.

You need to divide your spouse’s assets into two categories: probate and nonprobate.

An asset is nonprobate if your spouse entered into – please forgive the Latin – an inter vivos transaction.

That means your spouse either made a contract, gifted a future interest, executed a document such as a Transfer on Death Deed, or gave a survivorship right in co-owned assets that transferred owner-ship at death.

A small side note:

If your spouse transferred a community asset that ostensibly included your interest, then you may be looking at a fraud on the community lawsuit.

An asset is a probate asset if it is not subject to an inter vivos or nonprobate agreement.

A probate asset passes at your spouse’s death to your spouse’s heirs or devisees.

Your spouse’s probate assets make up your spouse’s probate estate.

Those assets pass subject to your deceased spouse’s debt.

Sound complicated?

That’s because it is, but let’s continue anyway.

You have certain additional rights as a surviving spouse.

These are provided by either the Texas Constitution or by statute.

You have a homestead right.

Even if your spouse owned your home as a separate property and left it to someone else, you have an exclusive right to occupy the homestead as long as you elect to occupy it as your home.

You have a duty, while you are exercising your homestead right, not to commit waste and to pay utilities, property taxes, mortgage interest and ordinary maintenance and repairs.

If there is not a homestead, then you have the right to an allowance from your spouse’s estate in lieu of a homestead.

You have a right to a family allowance for one year’s maintenance, provided you do not have sufficient separate estate.

The amount of the allowance is set by the probate court.

Another small side note:

If you and your spouse had a marital or premarital agreement, then you may have waived those rights.

What if a probate estate is not opened for your deceased spouse?

You still have the authority, as a surviving spouse, to take some interesting actions regarding the community property.

You can sue to recover it, sell or otherwise dispose of it to pay debts out of the community estate, and collect claims owing to the community estate.

And you can get paid a commission for your troubles.

What you cannot do when your spouse dies is close your eyes and hope that everything will turn out fine.

It won’t.

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

A House committee on Friday made public six years of former President Donald Trump's tax returns, which showed he paid relatively little in taxes in the years before and during his presidency.

The House Ways and Means Committee had voted to make the thousands of pages of returns public in a party-line vote last week, but their release was delayed while staffers redacted sensitive personal information like Social Security numbers from the documents. Friday's release, the culmination of years of legal wrangling and speculation, included both personal and business records.

Trump on Friday blasted the release in a statement and on his Truth Social platform, saying “the Democrats should have never done it, the Supreme Court should have never approved it, and it’s going to lead to horrible things for so many people."

He also maintained the returns he fought to keep hidden — despite modern precedent that Presidents make their returns public — "show how proudly successful I have been and how I have been able to use depreciation and various other tax deductions as an incentive for creating thousands of jobs and magnificent structures and enterprises.”

The panel’s top Republican, Rep. Kevin Brady of Texas, called the release of the documents “unprecedented,” and said Democrats had unleashed “a dangerous new political weapon that reaches far beyond the former President, overturning decades of privacy protections for average Americans.”

“This is a regrettable stain on the Ways and Means Committee and Congress, and will make American politics even more divisive and disheartening. In the long run, Democrats will come to regret it,” Brady said.

The returns confirm much of what was contained in a 39-page report from the Joint Committee on Taxation released last week, including summaries from Trump’s personal tax forms and business entities.

For example, in 2020, Trump appeared to owe nothing in taxes, the report showed. That was thanks to Trump claiming $15 million in business losses, which resulted in him having negative $4 million in adjusted gross income. Trump then claimed a $5 million refund.

Trump reported millions in negative income in 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2020, and he paid only $750 in federal income taxes in 2016 and 2017.

In 2019, Trump and his wife, Melania, reported significant losses of more than $16.4 million but reported a total income of $4.4 million.

The returns also show Trump had numerous foreign bank accounts between 2015 and 2016, including in China, the United Kingdom, Ireland and St. Martin. The existence of the China account was first reported by the New York Times in 2020. Trump Organization lawyer Alan Garten told the paper then that the company had “opened an account with a Chinese bank having offices in the United States in order to pay the local taxes” after opening an office “to explore the potential for hotel deals in Asia.”

The other accounts were in countries where Trump had properties. His 2018 through 2020 returns only note having an account in the U.K. “I have many bank accounts and they’re all listed and they’re all over the place,” Trump said during an Oct. 2020 presidential debate. “I was a businessman doing business.”

The committee report also listed several overarching issues it believed the IRS should have investigated. For example, Trump claimed large cash donations to charities, but the report said the IRS did not verify them. The report also said that while Trump’s tax filings were large and complicated, the IRS does not appear to have assigned experts to work on them.

The Ways and Means Committee separately released a 29-page report summarizing its investigation into an IRS policy that mandates audits of returns filed by presidents and vice presidents. The committee found that the IRS had largely not followed its own internal requirements, beginning to examine Trump’s returns only after the House panel inquired about the process. Just one year of Trump’s returns was officially selected for the mandatory review while he was in office, and that audit of Trump's 2016 taxes was not complete by the time he left the White House, according to the report.

An audit of Trump's 2015 taxes was started shortly before the 2016 audit in 2019 — the same day the Ways and Means committee asked for information on the mandatory audits. Neither the 2015 audit nor audits of Trump's 2017-19 taxes that began after he left office were marked as being part of the audit program, and as of last month, none had been marked as completed either, the committee said.

The committee obtained Trump's tax returns in November, following a yearslong court fight for documents that other presidents have routinely made public since the 1970s.

The dispute ended up at the Supreme Court, which rejected Trump’s last-ditch plea to block the release of his tax records to House Democrats in a brief order handed down just before Thanksgiving.

Trump's refusal to release his returns led to a swirl of suspicions about what he might be trying to hide — foreign business dealings, a smaller fortune than he'd claimed publicly or paying less in taxes than the average American.

During the 2016 campaign, Trump maintained that he couldn't release his returns because they were under audit, and that he would make them public when it was completed — a vow he walked away from after he took office.

Information about his taxes has dripped out over the years.

In October 2016, The New York Times published some of Trump's 1995 state taxes and reported that he'd declared a $916 million loss that year. Three tax experts hired by the paper said the size of the loss and tax rules governing wealthy filers at the time could have allowed Trump to legally pay no federal income taxes for 18 years.

After Trump took office in 2017, reporter David Cay Johnston went on MSNBC's "The Rachel Maddow Show" with what he said were two pages of Trump's Form 1040 from 2005.

The documents, which were published on Johnston's site DCReport.org, showed that Trump had paid $38 million in federal income tax on more than $150 million in income.

In September 2020, the Times reported that it had obtained two decades of Trump’s tax information, which showed he had not paid any income taxes in 10 of the prior 15 years, mostly because he reported significant losses. In the year he won the presidency and his first year in office, he paid just $750 in federal income tax, the paper found.

Asked about the report at the time, the then-president said the story was “made up" and that he’s “paid a lot of money in state” taxes. He later tweeted that he’d “paid many millions of dollars in taxes but was entitled, like everyone else, to depreciation & tax credits.”

Trump also fought unsuccessfully to keep his tax information out of the hands of investigators in New York, who were probing his business practices. That clash also went all the way to the Supreme Court, which denied Trump's attempt to block a grand jury from getting Trump’s personal and corporate tax returns in February of last year.

Those returns helped prosecutors from the Manhattan district attorney's office build a tax fraud case against Trump's company, the Trump Organization. The company was convicted this month of carrying out a 15-year tax fraud scheme that prosecutors said was orchestrated by top executives at the company.

During the trial, Trump's accountant Donald Bender testified that the former President had losses totaling $900 million in 2009 and 2010.

The company is scheduled to be sentenced on Jan. 13. Trump, who was not charged in the case, has dismissed the allegations and conviction as part of a politically motivated "witch hunt."

[teamfreewill2pointo]

So I guess they really did move! I’m so curious why Connecticut. Seems like a far move with all they had going on in Texas and fbbc. Thoughts?

The article said “The buyer is a trust tied to the actor Jensen Ackles.” What does that mean?

So, there are a lot of advantages to buying and selling houses with trusts. All the rich people do it. It's not that hard to set up a trust and I recommend it.

When they sold the Colorado house, they would have had to pay high taxes. By buying, renovating, and selling properties with the trust, they make more and more money without paying the taxes that most people would have to pay. This is something that's super common for the wealthy, although many don't sell their other properties

One of the reasons I gather information from a lot of different sides of fandom and share publicly what I can share is because it's fun to compare what people predicted with what actually happened. One of my Jensen sources called out Connecticut from the beginning and knew about this property before it went public.

You can bet that I'll be paying more attention to that person's guesses for future Jensen moves.

[oconnor2023]

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