Posted on March 11 at 4:05 a.m.

I disagree with Mr Schmidtchen's statement, "Also if you currently own and want to continue to be an owner, moving from your current home to another is also without too much risk...since you will be buying and selling in the same market." The reason is real estate taxes. As far as I know, how much real estate tax we pay in CA has a lot to do with the purchasing prices of our homes. Let's say, a guy named Joe bought a house 15 years ago for 200,000, so his tax would have been based on that price for all these years. Now suppose he sells the house for a million, and immediately buys another house for a million. So no losses at all, except for the agents' fees and closing costs, right? Wrong! Because his new real estate tax will be based on the price of one million rather than the original 200k!

On Is Now the Time to Buy a Home?