Luxury tax

What do you think about the implementation of this tax? Do you expect to see any opportunities for you? Or any unintended consequences for you or your business?

It will make me think twice about buying a second property here…

cool things down a bit housing wise in taipei/taoyuan county…call it a forced correction? since market forces here surprisingly have the word “real estate bubble” missing from their fundamentals… if you look south of those areas for the last 5 years prices have been pretty flat…speculators need a slap on the wrist, things are getting out of hand. you need a healthy real estate market, not insane, to sustain growth. if you are willing to service that mortgage for 2 years then you can sell it for whatever you want. you’ll make it back when you sell it, well, in theory. for the last 10 years there has been consistently over 1 million vacant units on the market, and it’s still moving…can you make sense of that? this is a short term solution. i am surprised they are implementing this so close to an election.
as for the luxury tax that will be imposed on luxury items, i think they mentioned cars over three million being the big one, if you can afford that benz, then you can afford that extra 10-15% anyways. they imposed that tax in certain parts of NA to vehicles years ago and it didn’t really affect volume. good cash grab for the gov’t anyways.

As of 01/01/2010 overseas income over $1m has to be reported under the AMT scheme. Only income over $6m is due to pay tax but I guess they are fishing for how much they can get if they start reducing that figure.

You’ll be free and clear as long as you keep it for more than two years.

I’m entirely against luxury tax altogether. It’s just a tax like any other. It doesn’t help anyone but the government AGAIN. Luxury is completely subjective. Your mobile phone is a luxury to someone, so might the food on your plate be. All cars could be considered luxuries. It’s all bullshit disguised as something that helps us all. Like taking people’s money from them was always a good way of helping us all. The only thing that pushes house prices up are stupid people. There are enough people that believe property can only ever be worth more and more. Increase the education and you will resolve the issue. Once the public realise all they have to do is not buy an apartment for a year or so, then they can collaboratively force the prices down themselves and kill the speculation in order to make their purchase. The government in this case are making money when they know that 80 percent of new money is prevented from supporting present prices anyway. A collapse is inevitable, they need not interfere at all. They like the idea of luxury tax because it is a way of pitting the have joys against the haves, and in this case they know the richer people are the minority. It’s easy to get the masses to resent people who have more money than them.

You’ll be free and clear as long as you keep it for more than two years.[/quote]

That’s very true; I had forgotten that it is only applied on houses not used for residence held less than two years. Cheers!