He walks and talks and thinks at a slow deliberate West Virginia stroll at all times, except when he's mad. It takes a lot to make him mad, and the sight of a property tax assessor is one of those things that gets him riled. When it comes to property taxes, I'm married to an original thinker, who literally turns the tax assessor away at the gate.

Now, when the plasma witch he normally is glued to since retirement, goes silent and he comes to my office-- I know he's dead serious and whatever it is, it's weighing on his mind. As I stopped and listened, I realized he's right -- some of you might benefit from knowing what an old hill billy who has worked hard for his every dime realizes.

Today, he informed me it's high time I wrote something people really need to know, instead of all that intellectual crap people who peck all day on keyboards think about. After twenty years, I don't take this as an insult, just Bill being the brutally honest person that he is. You always know where you stand with him. There's a lot to be said for that, not many missed signals there.

He wants people to know about how they can stop being robbed by property taxes. He wants you to seize an opportunity to save your family a lot of money, before your next property tax bill arrives.

When I met my mountain man, he had spent a life-time working hard, playing hard, and saving hard. This was as natural to him as breathing, as he'd come up in life the hard way on a working farm that barely provided a living for his parents.

He'd never even had the luxury of electricity until he left home to join the Army. He'd also never known things my childhood took for granted, like indoor plumbing, Christmas presents, or toys. His entire childhood was spent doing chores before school, after school until bedtime, with the only day not spent working on the farm being Sundays.

Each year, he was given a hog to raise. The profits from that hog was his money to buy school supplies and things he needed. One hog a year, made buying his first pack of gum (at age 10) a cautious decision to spurge, and an event to be remembered for life. Fifty-six years later, he still has the carefully folded wrappers and outside pack as a souvenir.

Later, when he got out of the Army, dreaming of bigger things, not wanting to go back to farm life -- he lived in his car while working full time as a janitor, and had a second full time job at the local steel mill. He saved every spare cent to have a home of his own. It took him almost three years to buy his first house, that cost $7,500. A one bedroom broken down wooden house that was more than fifty years old.

By luck, he finally landed a job working on the railroad. I say by luck, solely because when he was hired, the man in charge of hiring took pity upon him. He'd come to that employment office no less than once a week, for more than a year, trying to get on the B&O railroad. Finally, the foreman said he'd give him a chance just because he was so persistent. However, when he took his physical, at six-foot-five inches, he was over their height restriction of six-foot-one. The foreman looked at the doctor's report and said:

"The nurse must have made a mistake. I'm six foot one and you ain't any taller than me."

Ten years later, after working dirty shirts (railroad freight runs) hauling coal and grain, he'd never taken a day off work, except his annual vacation. His driven work ethic resulted in him now owning two city blocks of property, three houses, and two farms. None of them ever had a mortgage that he didn't pay off in full after a couple of years. He paid cash for everything else, including his cars. As the years went by, his union wages afforded him a life that most of his relatives from that farming community of three hundred and nineteen people, couldn't and still can't imagine.

I share this solely because I want you to understand that while he may not have a college education, he has one thing many of the rest of us with higher educations don't always have -- a lot of common sense. His life has been defined largely by growing up knowing the value of the dollars he worked so hard for. He's not the kind to pay a penny more than he has to for anything.

He once proudly believed in paying one's fair share of property taxes, but there came a turning point in his thinking, when tax assessors kept raising his property taxes year after year, seemingly without any rhyme or reason. This was eating at him, until he realized he could challenge their tax assessments and win.

He was forty-six years old the year we bought a seven hundred acre farm. It was the last farm on a several mile dirt mountain road. You had to open two locked metal gates to get to gate closest to the house. The property had had no improvements in the last fifty years, and one of the selling points in buying the place was that the taxes were relatively low.

In that region, once a year the tax assessors pay a visit. They can't come on your property unless you allow them. If you do allow them, you have to let them inspect everything. Furthermore, in West Virginia, you have personal property taxes.

Meaning you pay a tax on your vehicles, farm equipment, lawn mowers, and even on your televisions. Now, that can wear on a hard working man -- paying taxes on something you paid taxes on in the first place to buy -- year-after-year. Everyone only admits to what they have to (like their cars and trucks), and it's a untalked about game between the tax payee and the tax assessors as to what really gets reported.

This is especially true when the county tax assessor is your dead cousin's wife. You might have forty-seven first cousins, but you know them well. Lois only got the job because her husband fell off the tractor and it run over him. Everyone felt bad, so no one ran against her come election time. So, she's driving her fat self around in a Cadillac from the life insurance, and sending out a clerk (another cousin) to do the dirty work of property assessment. The more her office collects, the higher her salary for bossing people around. No one likes her, but they all know they need her if they get a drunk driving ticket or some other problem, she's the one to be on the good side of.

We no sooner bought that property and here comes her clerk in his own big old Lincoln. Bubba's not a bit happy about traveling back that dirt road with hairpin turns, wash outs, ruts, and sometimes fallen trees. He's down there honking at the gate, wanting someone to let him in.

Bill's standing at the kitchen window letting the steam off his collar rise to it's boiling point while he thinks on the situation. He gets his shotgun from behind the door and tells me to stay indoors, lock the door behind him, and not answer the door unless it's him.

Down the hill he strolls with his shotgun in plain sight. He's walking at his typical West Virginia slow lumbering pace, like he's on an afternoon walk to pick flowers. He stops and shoots a raccoon, that's been poaching our chickens just for show and because he's worried about rabies.

Bubba, who was standing outside his car, stops reaching inside the rolled down window and honking that horn. I guess he was remembering all the turkey shoots Bill won and the sharpshooter awards he'd gotten in the Army that everyone always talked about. Everyone knows Bill can be ornery if you annoy him. Maybe he was thinking that horn was annoying.

From my window perch, I see Bubba quickly getting back in his car. He leans out the window and shakes his finger at Bill while having some kind of animated conversation on his part. Bill lifts the shotgun up to shoot. Down drops a dead squirrel from a tree above Bubba's car hood, splattering blood on his windshield. Bubba throws his Lincoln in reverse, and backs so fast back that dirt road with no place to turn around, that I could hear him bottoming out the car on the high places clear up to the house.

By then, all six of our dogs were barking, the geese were shrieking, and every other animal, wild or tame, were playing the frozen statue game. When Bill got back to the house, with a dead raccoon and a dead squirrel in one big hand, the shotgun in the other, dripping blood everywhere -- I was busy lying to the widow who lived closest to us on the phone -- that I didn't know who the crazy person backing out past her house was. She's such a gossip.

Hanging up the phone, I asked:

"Well, what did you say to Bubba?"

"Not much. Asked him if anyone had died in the family, because that's the only time I wanted to see him at my gate. Told me he wanted to come look around and do a tax assessment. Shot a raccoon and squirrel that might be rabid. Would have told him I was getting ready to go to work, so today wasn't a good day to be assessing anything I own. But for some reason, he high tailed it out of here without saying so much as a goodbye."

For next the fifteen years we lived there, we never saw a tax assessor back our road, guess stories get around about possible rabid dead squirrels and raccoons. Every time we'd run into Bubba he'd be in a hurry to be somewhere else. Taxes never went up either.

Well, here in the big city, even a country bumpkin knows that waving a shotgun around won't keep the tax assessor from coming around, especially when its done in drive-by and fly by mode.

What the fighting madman about property taxes in the other room wants you to know is -- that in a world where everyone is long faced about home values plummeting and local governments are looking for ways to bring in lost revenue -- property taxes are rising dramatically.

Meanwhile, people here and across the country are seeing homes that sold for $400,000 a year ago, now selling for less than half that. Now, those county tax assessments that were once based on that previous $400,000 amount, aren't going to voluntarily admit the problem and reduce your property tax obligation. If you don't speak up and get your property reassessed to the current property value, it's estimated that you might be paying more than sixty percent more than you should.

You don't need a shotgun, you just need to know how the system works. Don't wait to get that next bigger property tax bill, now is the time for action. It could save you hundreds or thousands of dollars.  Property tax laws and appeals vary from state to state and municipality.  That said, it truly isn't very hard to get your property taxes reduced.  This one thing, might save many homeowners a good bit of money and is worth looking into.