In the USA, can you lose your home even after it is 100% paid off?
In the USA, can you lose your home even after it is 100% paid off?
Let’s say that you buy a home in cash and have 100% paid off. Could you still lose it somehow?
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My property tax is $1200 a year. Failure to pay that for a while (a year or three) could result in the state selling the house, keeping the overdue taxes, and paying me the rest (if there is any. Sometimes they get sold cheap).
The state can also buy my house from me under eminent domain, to put in a rail line, or power lines, or some other utility. They'd owe me "fair value" for it, but they basically determine what that means, and it could be significantly less than what i could sell it in the market for (but to be fair, taxes are based on "fair value", and almost everyone quietly allows the state to low-ball their property value because of this).
It can also be condemned. If it's egregiously not maintained and shows obvious signs of structural issues, or the property gets hoarded up and looks like a trash dump. This is much more common with commercial property.
There's also civil asset forfeiture. If you're manufacturing and/or selling drugs/weapons/etc. (as a random example. Any crime counts really) on a property, it can be seized outright with no requisite compensation at all.
HOAs ar often described as similar to asset forfeiture, but they're closer to a tax siezure. The HOA has to have in its charter that they can fine members for rule violations, and the process for an HOA is the same as for overdue taxes, but with unpaid fines. The authority for HOA is entirely contractual, you have to sign a contract agreeing to those rules.
All of these are incredibly rare occurrences, and usually involve some sort of genesis, like an investor wants a specific property, neighbors hate someone, etc.
Back in the neighborhood I grew up in, we actually had a drug house that was taken by civil asset forfeiture. They had an RV/trailer (IDK which it was) in their driveway that people would go into for drug related shit and at one point a vehicle was set on fire in the middle of the night, probably to destroy the evidence it was stolen. I'm glad the drug selling scum were taken care of, especially since there were kids on the block.
There are two kinds of asset forfeiture: civil and criminal. Criminal would be what you describe, if you are convicted they can seize any property involved in the crime. Civil asset forfeiture is something else, and it often abused to take things where the crime is only suspected. (It was originally supposed to be used to take property involved in a crime, such as an empty pirate ship, where the owner is not known.)