Free guides · Texas & Oklahoma
The things nobody tells you.
Working checklists for the parts of owning a home that quietly cost the most money. Free to read, free to print, no email required.
Working checklists for the parts of owning a home that quietly cost the most money. Free to read, free to print, no email required.
226 items across 7 guides, and 109 of them are things most homeowners never hear about. Every deadline and rule was verified against the statute or the regulator, and each guide lists its sources so you can check our work.
Texas has no state income tax, which means property tax is where the money is, and where the mistakes are expensive.
Oklahoma calculates property tax on a completely different mechanic than Texas, and homeowners who move between the two states almost always misread their first bill.
In Texas and Oklahoma, the two lines that decide whether a hailstorm is an inconvenience or a financial event are your wind and hail deductible and how your roof is settled.
Most loans that fall apart do not fail at pre-approval. They fail in the six weeks after it, over things the buyer did not know counted.
A regular home inspection does not fully cover a well or a septic system. The gap shows up after closing if nobody checked for it before.
The clock starts the moment your contract is accepted, not the day you get around to reading it.
Commission gets all the attention. The line items that actually differ between the two states are title custom, transfer tax, and how the tax bill gets split at closing.
Start with the property state, review the facts that trigger disclosures, and download verified public TREC, OREC, and EPA PDFs. No email required.
Run your purchase price and county tax rate against what your lender currently collects, and see the math behind the jump once the county reassesses. Educational estimate, formula shown on the page.
Running numbers on a specific house? The free mortgage calculator uses your county's real property tax rate and the Texas homestead exemption, which is where most online estimates go wrong.