Delaware puts an 8% excise tax on every hotel, motel and tourist-home room in the state, and a county can add up to 3% on top. The combined rate reaches 11%. That’s in the state everybody drives to because there’s no sales tax, which turns out to be a narrower promise than the slogan. These…
Iowa’s effective property tax rate runs 1.40%, against a 0.91% national average, according to the Tax Foundation. That’s roughly 54% more than the typical American homeowner pays. These are the popular money rules that don’t work for every Iowa household. Note: This is general information, not financial, tax or legal advice. Rules of thumb, tax…
More than 70% of debt collection lawsuits nationwide end in a default judgment, according to a 2020 Pew Charitable Trusts study of state court records. South Carolina gives you 30 days from the day you’re served to file a written answer. Miss it, and the court can enter judgment for the full amount the creditor…
Texas Property Code Section 92.056 presumes seven days is a reasonable time to fix something once a tenant reports a health or safety problem in writing. The code never names a fixed number of days anywhere else. A sewage backup or a broken pipe gets no grace period at all, and the clock doesn’t start…
A single vintage Pyrex mixing bowl, in the right rare pattern, has been listed on eBay for close to $6,000, according to House Digest. Plenty of those mixing bowls get donated or thrown out. The pattern on the side is the whole difference, and the same goes for several other things sitting in South Carolina…
A coupon can look perfectly good in the Publix app and still leave you paying full price at the register. It isn’t a bug. Publix publishes its coupon policy in full, competitor coupons included, but like every grocery chain it keeps limits inside that policy. These are the Publix app coupon rules that cost Floridians…
Publix has 897 stores in Florida, well over half of the 1,442 it runs across eight states. Seasonal residents pour back into those aisles every fall, carrying a year of shopping habits picked up somewhere else. The regulars notice. These are the snowbird habits at Publix that make Floridians roll their eyes. 1. Grabbing Just…
Cracker Barrel’s gift shops rang up nearly $652 million in fiscal 2025, across 657 stores. That averages around a million dollars a year per gift shop. These are the Cracker Barrel gift shop impulse buys Ohioans can’t walk past. 1. Old-Fashioned Sanded Candy Cracker Barrel stocks a full wall of old-fashioned sanded candy, in flavors…
A Wake County driver bought a Kia for $17,000 in March 2024. The state valued it at $20,090 the next year, WRAL reported. North Carolina resets a vehicle’s taxable value every January 1, and many of the state’s biggest counties raised their rate for the fiscal year that started July 1. Neither of those has…
Like any supermarket, a Food Lion register can ring up more than the shelf tag says. Plenty of shoppers pay it and keep moving, if they notice it at all. But Food Lion has a policy for that. It isn’t posted where you’d trip over it, and it isn’t the only rule sitting between a…
