SR Cooper Publishing Coming soon

Your Next California Home

Equity, Tax Strategy, and Financing for the Experienced Buyer

A guide for the California owner who is buying again. After a long time in one house, the equity is not the problem — what is attached to it is: a Proposition 13 basis that cannot be bought at today's prices, a gain that outgrew the exclusion, and a mortgage the underwriter keeps counting until the old house is resolved.

The book is built around one decision. Sell it, rent it, or keep it as a second home — each branch carries different property tax, capital gains, qualifying income, reserve, and insurance consequences, and they are worked through in figures rather than described.

It also covers the parts of Proposition 19 that consumer guidance still gets wrong: who is eligible, which sale-and-purchase sequence forecloses a base transfer entirely, and the two-year clock that expires before the one most people are watching.

16 chapters
Paperback
Worksheets & glossary

Reader worksheets

This book's companion worksheets will be posted here when it publishes. They include the three-branch comparison (sell, rent, or keep), a Proposition 19 transferred-base estimate, a hold-versus-sell comparison, a post-closing liquidity check, and an adjusted-basis log.

Where this book stops

Tax positions belong to a California CPA and title, trust, and entity questions belong to an attorney. The book says so at each boundary, and sets out the questions to bring to them and what a sound answer sounds like — rather than answering them itself.