Homestead mailing list

[Barbara Lamar <blamar AT satx.rr.com>]

Rob wrote:

> Can you tell us what happened to the lady?


Since she owns her house outright and gets the "over-65" exemption on 
her county and city real estate taxes and lives frugally, her disposable 
income was too high to ask IRS to write off the debt as uncollectible, 
so we got IRS to abate some of the penalties and interest and set up an 
installment plan she could manage. We told her to be sure and let us 
know if anything changed for her -- for example if she had medical 
expenses, house repair bills and so forth -- if her expenses increase, 
we can have the installment amounts lowered, or perhaps get the debt 
written off. She was not a good candidate for an Offer in Compromise 
since she has equity in her house.

We've been calling her every few weeks to see how she's doing, but the 
last couple of times we tried to call there was  no answer. I hope she's 
just visiting her children for the holidays.

It's a shame she didn't come to see us a couple of years ago. We could 
have helped her structure her arrangement with the nursing home in such 
a way as to lower the amount of social security tax she had to pay.

Barbara