With higher property taxes, monthly payments for homes don’t change much. More goes to the government, in the form of taxes, and less goes to the bank, in the form of mortgage payments — because the sale price is lower — but the monthly payment should come out roughly the same.

Of course, you don’t want to be stuck with a mortgage on a house you bought just before a property-tax hike.

That sounds about normal here. I pay just shy of 3%. It varies from place to place.

Just to put that in perspective (just in case 2-3% sounds like peanuts to some people).

If you assume a natural rate of interest ~5%, a $200,000 house in Plano corresponds to $10,000 in imputed rent (basically, the $200,000 corresponds to the net present value of a discounted $10,000 a year perpetual cash flow). That $200,000 house will land the city/county/school district ~$4,500 (I’m rounding) per year in ‘rent’. So, $4,500/$14,500 = 31% tax on the ‘income’ of that property. Conversely, with no tax, the property would be worth (at ~5% natural/discount rate) about $290,000 since the family is willing to pay $14,500 annually to live there – again, your corresponding 31% price discount, by my crummy math, anyway, caused by the property tax. The city/county/schools effectively ‘seize’ $90,000 of the value of the house and rent it out.

(Supposing we rounded the California rate to 1%, the corresponding number is ~17%).

Most people would say a 31% income tax is pretty high, granted it is limited to only one asset class. Texas is a great place, don’t get me wrong, and Plano surely does seem like a nice place to live. But a lot of that ‘too good to be true’ stuff you hear really is too good to be true. Texas doesn’t get to flout basic economics. The laws of the universe operate here, too.

Other stuff sounds about right.