Tax Credit Closing Deadline Extended

The $8,000 First-time Home Buyer and $6,500 Repeat Home Buyer Tax Credits closing deadline has been extended to September 30, 2010. The deadline had previously been set at June 30th, 2010. This will give buyers a few more months to get those deals closed.

The extension applies only to transactions that had executed contracts in place as of April 30th, 2010, and have not yet closed. There will not be a gap between the original deadline of June 30th and the date President Obama signs the bill into law.

Additionally, Congress has extended the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) through September 30th, 2010. The bill is retroactive and will cover the lapse period from June 1, 2010, to the date the law is enacted.

For additional information on both the tax credit deadline and the National Flood Insurance Program, visit here:  http://www.realtor.org/Government_Affairs

Tax Credit Coming To A Close...

In twelve days the deadline for the $8,000 first-time home buyer and $6,500 repeat home buyer tax credits will arrive. You must find a home and get a contract executed by midnight on April 30th to receive the credit, but have until June 30th to close on the home.

Anyone who hasn't owned a home in the past three years is considered a "first-time home buyer." Repeat home buyers do not have to sell their old home before purchasing, but you may not have a choice if you cannot qualify for two mortgages. To receive the credit, the new home does NOT have to be more expensive and you must have lived there for five consecutive years any time during the past eight years. Both credits require yearly income limits for eligibility of $125,000/year for singles and $225,000/year for marrieds filing jointly.

If you have any questions or want to see if you qualify for a loan, don't hesitate to call me today (512) 703-7416. There is still time to get a home. Once you find one that meets your needs, it will take about two days to negotiate and arrive at mutually agreed price and terms and get the contract "executed." That leaves you about 10 days from today to get something in. So "hur' up fo the hogs come'n get it!" Something grandma used to say on her farm growing up. I suppose it's application in this situation isn't exactly a bullseye, but the point is to hurry before some big hog comes out of the woods and eats up all the good properties!

In My Day, Tax Credits Were A Nickel!

When this first-time home buyer tax credit deal was first introduced in 2008 it was a $7,500 credit that had to be repaid starting in 2010, $500/year over 15 years and if you move early, you pay all that remained. It was for first-time home buyer's who bought between April 9th 2008 to July 1st 2009. I signed up for this credit and I don't regret that I did, but I think it is ludicrous that when they changed it to a higher amount of $8,000 AND non-repayable, that they didn't retroactively include the $7,500 credit to make it non-repayable as well. I am even more surprised that they didn't change it during the expansion. The old credit's original expiration deadline even OVERLAPPED with the new credit's start date (January 1st, 2009), albeit when the new credit was introduced the expiration for the $7,500 credit became December 31st 2008. This is crazy! They need to either make all of them repayable or none of the repayable. 

I know life's not fair, I realized this when my parents gave me a '92 Chevy Astro extended cab, black cargo van for my first car. It had a bare metal interior ceiling, sounded like an airplane taking off when you accelerated, the back bench folded flat into a bed, not even a tape deck, and the sliding door didn't open from the inside. This is what I had to drive around in high school. Big black vans that have no exit strategy from the inside are not exactly popular with the ladies in that particular period of life. You know how many girls I got? Zero. I would roll up next to a pretty girl and ask her if she'd ever been 0-60 in 33 seconds flat. I would tell her that we could go so fast her hair would whip in the breeze, but I'd have to have the AC on high at the same time or it wouldn't work.... something about aerodynamics. I'm no scientist. The only way I could have gotten girls in that van is if I painted "Free Puppies!" on the side of it. I would rather stand in my underwear and have a group of college cheerleaders point and laugh at me than to relive those moments again.

My point to all this is that Martin Luther King Jr. said, to summarize basically in a nut shell, that things need to be unequivocally balanced and fair. Giving Person 1 a lower amount that he has to return and Person 2 a higher amount that he doesn't have to return for the performance of the same action is undoubtedly unfair. No one has paid back any of the $7,500 yet, so it's a simple fix! But alas, it's the government and they aren't always fair. And hey, I'm lucky I got anything at all. This whole predicament takes me back to when I got my second car.... an eggplant purple '97 Chrysler Town & Country minivan. Upgrade! The ladies pursued like piranhas to fresh meat as I'm sure you can imagine.