How to Appeal Your Property Taxes in Kankakee County (and How to File It Yourself)
Kankakee County publishes assessment changes in September and sets a single final appeal date in October for the entire county. The county posts that exact date each year, and filing the appeal costs you nothing. I know the process works because I ran it on my own house. My assessment jumped about 2
How I Rate Southwest Suburb Towns (and What Each Star Actually Means)
Every town guide I write ends with a star rating across eight categories. This page defines every one of them: what is measured, where the number comes from, and what separates three stars from four. I am putting this in writing for a simple reason. Almost every town rating online tells you a place
How to Appeal Your Property Taxes in Will County (and How to File It Yourself)
My assessment jumped about 25 percent, and my first reaction was the same one most people have, which is to assume somebody official had already checked the number and it must be right. Nobody had checked it. I appealed on comparable properties, and the valuation came down somewhere in the range of
Moving to Palos Heights, IL: Should You Buy a Home Here?
The three Palos villages are easy to blur together, and Palos Heights is the one that sits in the middle, in price, in feel, and on the map. It offers something its two neighbors do not: an actual walkable downtown, plus Lake Katherine and a close-in Metra station, wrapped around a settled, establis
Moving to Palos Hills, IL: Should You Buy a Home Here?
The three Palos villages get talked about as one place, but they are not, and Palos Hills is the one that surprises people. It is the affordable, denser, more practical member of the trio, home to Moraine Valley Community College and a housing mix heavy on condos, townhomes, and modest single-family
Moving to Palos Park, IL: Should You Buy a Home Here?
People tend to lump the three Palos villages together, and they are genuinely different places. Palos Park is the wooded, big-lot, slow-down end of the trio: horse trails, forest preserve on three sides, and a village center that still feels like a small town. If you want space and quiet inside a re
How Do Home Inspections Work? (And What Happens If You Waive One?)
Most people walk into their first home inspection unsure what actually happens, what gets checked, and what to do with the report when it lands. Then a long list of findings shows up and it reads like the house is falling apart. It usually is not. An inspection is one of the most useful steps in how
Why Did My Escrow Payment Go Up? (Your Rate Is Fixed, So What Happened?)
You locked a fixed rate. The whole point of a fixed rate is that the payment never moves. Then a letter shows up from your servicer, and next month's payment is a couple hundred dollars higher than the one before it. Nothing about your loan changed, and yet the bill did. If that is you right now, yo
Moving to Tinley Park, IL: Should You Buy a Home Here?
If you have been priced out of Frankfort or Orland Park but you still want an established Cook County suburb with a real downtown, a Metra line, and solid schools, Tinley Park is probably the town you should be looking at hardest. It is one of the best values in the established South Suburbs, and th