In El Dorado Hills, the mortgage is the easy part to work out.
Every mortgage calculator on the internet will give you a payment. Almost none of them know that most of El Dorado Hills sits inside a Community Facilities District, which adds a Mello-Roos special tax on top of your property tax every year until the bonds are paid off.
That tax does not show up in a national calculator, and your lender counts it against what you can borrow. Which means the number you have been working from is probably wrong, and probably wrong in the direction that matters.
This one puts it in. Tell it roughly what the special tax is, or leave it on the middle setting, and send me the address when you want the real figure off the county roll.
The number that surprises people
The mortgage is not what it costs to live here.
Most of El Dorado Hills built since the early nineties sits inside a Community Facilities District, which means a Mello-Roos special tax on top of your property tax, every year, until the bonds are paid off. It is not enormous. It is also not nothing, and because your lender counts it against what you can borrow, it quietly decides which houses you are allowed to look at.
Move it to the house you are actually looking at. The special tax does not scale with the price, so it bites hardest at the lower end.
Anything under twenty percent usually adds mortgage insurance, which is not counted below.
Thirty-year fixed. Move it to whatever you are actually being quoted.
Per month. Most associations here do not publish their dues, so ask for the current figure in writing before you write an offer.
Property tax is estimated at 1.1% of the purchase price, which is the one percent base plus the voter-approved additions typical of El Dorado County. The Mello-Roos figure here is the band you picked, not a published rate for any community. Districts set their own rate and band it by lot, so the only figure that counts is the one on the tax bill for the actual house, which you can get from the county or from NBS, the district administrator, on (800) 676-7516. Not included here: home insurance, mortgage insurance if you put less than twenty percent down, or utilities. This is a planning number, not a loan estimate.
Three things this number does not include
Mortgage insurance, if you are putting less than twenty percent down. Homeowners insurance, which in the foothills is no longer a small line. And the real Mello-Roos on a specific parcel, which is banded by lot size, so two houses on the same street can carry different amounts.
The exact special tax on any given house is public. It is on the county tax bill as its own line, under its own CFD code, and I will look it up for you before you write an offer. And if you would rather avoid it altogether, there are parts of El Dorado Hills with no Mello-Roos at all.
If you want the real number on a real address, call me. (916) 296-4953. It takes about ten minutes and it is the kind of thing that is much better to know before you fall in love with the house.
Lets connect
Start with a conversation.
No contract, no obligation, and no pressure to be further along than you are. Plenty of people write to me a year before they are ready, and that is genuinely the right time to write.
