We’ve been eager to receive our property tax refund check, but didn’t expect to receive it so soon.

The tax assessor’s office told us it could take 60-90 days to receive the refund; it only took 21 days. In addition, we were expecting ~$354, but received $384.44. Thank God! We deposited the $384.44 into our E*TRADE savings account to help bolster our emergency fund.

Since property taxes in San Diego County can only increase 2% a year, we just saved ourselves a bunch of money while we own the condo. And, if property values continue to fall, we will likely ask that our condo be reassessed again next year to further reduce our property taxes.

I enjoy listening to talk radio, primarily the business talk radio. Yesterday, I was listening to The Ray Lucia Show when he received a call from a gentleman that wanted to discuss saving money on taxes.

The gentleman is 45 and owns his own company that profits $250,000/year. While he does not have any retirement savings, he owns his home outright and has rental homes and a commercial property that are nearly paid off. Pretty awesome, especially for a 45 year old. What threw me off was when Ray asked him his net worth, the gentleman replied $3,000,000 to $4,000,000.

I didn’t even hear Ray’s answer to the tax question because I couldn’t get over the insanely wide range of $3,000,000 to $4,000,000. Granted, the gentleman was put on the spot and, with the instability in the housing market, it is difficult to know exactly what property is worth. But not knowing your net worth within $1,000,000 seems incomprehensible to me. For us, that would mean the difference between retiring and not retiring.

Our original property tax bill was for two payments of $1842.84 ($3,685.68 total). We just received our revised bill for two payments of $1,458.40 ($2,916.80 total) after having our property value reassessed. That means we saved $767.20 on our property taxes this year.

We mailed a $1,458.40 check for the second installment. Since we paid our first installment for the original amount ($1,812.84) back in December, they will be issuing us a refund for $354.44 within 60-90 days. Good stuff!

Our condo is getting some major work done, paid for by the HOA, but we’ve lost use of our family room for a couple of weeks.

The splurging all began when, in the process of moving our furniture out of the family room, we broke our cheap IKEA entertainment stand. We found a nice, smaller replacement stand for only $99. Not bad, but we figured our 15-year old speaker towers and clunky 4-piece stereo/DVD system was going to look poor on the new stand, espcially hooked up to our 1-year old plasma (last years splurge). So, we bought a 5-channel Panasonic Home Theater System at Costco for $399. It’s sweet, and here’s how we rationalized the purchase:

Pros
Nice sounding and looking
Requires less than 1/2 of the space as our old system
iPod hook up so we can have all of our music available at the touch of a button
$60 of the cost was covered by selling our old stereo system

Cons
Price
Our old system still worked

We probably could have got away with using our old system a couple of more years but what the heck, we treated ourselves. We can’t wait to get our family room back so we can watch a movie using our new home theater system. It will also be nice to have more space in our little condo.