<p>NJmom: isn’t the NJ estate tax only over a certain $$ amount though? sorry to digress…</p>
<p>NJ may appear to have a high tax rate, and it does for the most part…But after living in Northern Bergen county for decades and relocating to Philly area,it isn’t as bad as I thought…In PA,taxes are decent,but you are ‘fee’d’ to death…and in NJ,real estate transfer fees aren’t as bad,as PA,where you pay on both buy and sell,regardless of purchase price…in NJ,it is on any sale and buys above 1 mill</p>
<p>Also NJ doesn’t have wages taxes in municipalities,even if you don 't work in Philly,wages taxes are 1%…though Philly is much higher</p>
<p>My real estate taxes are ~$4 per $1000 of assessed value.</p>
<p>At the time we finally sold it a little more than a year ago, the real estate taxes on the house in Glen Ridge (in Essex County, approx. 12 miles due west of the Lincoln Tunnel) where my ex and I used to live and my son grew up – your standard 4-bedroom colonial on 1/8 of an acre – were about $16,000. (It was actually close to $18,000, but my ex successfully challenged the last assessment.)</p>
<p>10 minutes to cross the GW Bridge? Ha, ha; very funny. I can see the GW Bridge from all the windows of the apartment where I now live in upper Manhattan. Maybe that’s true at 4 am on a weeknight, or at 2 pm on a Tuesday afternoon. Depending. Otherwise, no chance. And the same is true of the Lincoln Tunnel. Through which I commuted daily for 23 years (for 13 years from Glen Ridge and 10 from Clifton [where the building I lived in, and my living room window, could be seen in the background of one Sopranos episode], and spent an average of an hour every morning (sometimes as much as 90 minutes to 2 hours) traveling the 12 miles by car or DeCamp or NJ Transit bus. Coming home at night was just as bad, especially at rush hour or if it rained. Or drizzled. There was one winter night I’ll never forget, when there was an ice storm and it took almost 4 hours to drive home that short distance.</p>
<p>Never again! I now have a very predictable 40 minute commute on the subway, door to door. On which I can sit and read in the morning, and on the way home at night, and not have to worry about traffic. Or driving. Or being on a standing-room only bus. Ugh.</p>
<p>Oh, yes, don’t forget that NJ has the highest car insurance rates in the U.S. The annual premium for my unexceptional Toyota Corolla was almost $2,000. It’s half that in NYC, where the rates aren’t exactly low.</p>
<p>Suffice it to say I"m not a huge fan of New Jersey these days, except when my son happens to be in the state.</p>
<p>Donna; you must have seen the nightmare this morning on the GWB then!!!..</p>
<p>unfortunately, as you state, there are only a few good commuting areas in NJ at this point (and I don’t consider ANYTHING on a bus as “good”)…</p>
<p>but there are some of us who are “stuck” here for whatever reasons…businesses etc…</p>
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<p>I completely agree. Unfortunately, I never lived anyplace in New Jersey that was convenient to a train station. Not that trains don’t have their own issues, just like buses (there are few things more annoying than just missing one and having to wait another hour for the next one), but at least traffic isn’t a problem. Usually.</p>
<p>When I was looking for a place to move to last year, the only towns in New Jersey I even considered were Jersey City and Hoboken, where I could have found a place within walking distance of the PATH train. (Which is more like a subway than a train.) But it wasn’t hard at all to decide on Manhattan. Even apart from the fact that everybody in the nice parts of Hoboken seems to be under 40, I had concerns about the crime rates in both towns, plus rents (I wasn’t buying) are considerably higher than I was willing to pay (especially if I wanted a view of the Hudson) and generally don’t even include heat, plus, from everything I’ve read, a lot of the so-called “luxury apartment buildings” in Hoboken and Jersey City were put up in about 15 minutes and are basically made out of cardboard (including a lot of the condominium developments, which are largely unsold, so that many of the apartments are rented out). </p>
<p>Give me a nice, solid, prewar, Art Deco building in Manhattan right on the Hudson, a five minute walk from the Cloisters, like the one I live in now, any time!</p>
<p>Might look at Westfield and Summit–both Union County towns with real downtowns. Summit has Midtown Direct; Westfield does not have Midtown Direct but does have good service to Newark Penn Station with option then of PATH or NJ Transit to city. I think there is a big lifestyle difference between the towns right on the river like Fort Lee and Weehawken and the close-in suburbs like Montclair, South Orange, Summit, and so on. Pricing aside, they are very different kinds of places, with the “real” suburbs having much more school- and child-oriented atmosphere. Lots of nice houses, with condos as an afterthought and not necessarily the core of the community.</p>
<p>one thing to remember about Bergen County is you still can’t shop on Sundays!</p>
<p>The blue laws really only pertain to Paramus,where all Malls are closed…elsewhere you can shop in Bergen County</p>
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<p>Such familiar names! The house my ex and I owned in Glen Ridge was right on the town line with Upper Montclair and we spent a great deal of time there; my ex grew up in South Orange; and we were married at the Summit Hotel in 1987.</p>
<p>All wonderful places. But I can’t say I miss any of it very much. It seems like another lifetime when I think about it now.</p>
<p>There are some beautiful new condo/town homes in Tarrytown, right on the river and very close to the Hudson line train station. Also true of Croton-on-Hudson.</p>