As property values have increased significantly in many areas of the country, some localities have taken steps to increase their tax revenues by increasing their real estate taxes. But take heart: you can take steps to potentially lower these taxes by examining the assessed value of your home.

How could your assessor be wrong? It might depend on when you property was last appraised.

Although assessments must typically be established each year, some assessors might not perform an annual appraisal of every property they assess. Instead, individual valuations are sometimes made when there is a municipal-wide reassessment, and then carried forward until another municipal-wide reassessment is performed. In some cases, many years can pass between reassessments. So, if your property value has fallen, you could be paying more than you should.

Moreover, when assessments are conducted, errors can sometimes be made. Some of these errors may include the size of your home or the number of bedrooms and bathrooms. Sometimes unfinished basements are listed as finished in the assessor’s report; sometimes garages that don’t exist are factored into the property value.

You can obtain a property valuation report from your local assessor’s office upon request. Study it for these possible errors. And, compare your home’s value to others in the neighborhood; it should be in line. Obtain proof of any errors, and then visit the assessor’s office to ask how you can dispute the report.

If your property value is assessed correctly, there might be other tax breaks available, depending on where you live. Although property taxes are typically imposed by cities, townships, counties and school districts, some states specify a maximum tax rate as the standard for local assessors to follow.

In closing, you should also know that property tax protests must be made in a timely manner, and that there are strict deadlines that must be met for making a timely protest. For information regarding these deadlines, you should contact the assessor’s office in your local community.

Bonds aren’t the only way investors can generate income; stocks can be viable options as well. Some stocks, anyway—such as preferred stocks.

Preferred stock is a class of ownership in a corporation which generally has priority over common stockholders on earnings and assets in the event of liquidation.

Even though preferred stocks are listed as equity on a company’s balance sheet, they generally behave more like bonds than common stocks. First, some investors feel that preferred stock offers a potentially higher level of security than common stock, because if the company goes bankrupt, dividends on the company’s preferred stock are paid after the company’s debt but before dividends on the company’s common stock. (Of course, no investment is completely secure.) But preferred stock may also be a great way to generate income. That’s because preferred stock has a stated dividend which must be paid before dividends to common stockholders. And, most preferred stocks are eligible for the 15% tax rate on dividends (preferred stocks issued by real estate investment trusts, or REITS, being the notable exception).

So, if you’re looking for potentially lower volatility and higher dividends than common stocks offer for your portfolio, preferred stocks may be worth considering.

On the other hand, preferred stock offers little potential for growth of capital. An investor generally buys shares of a preferred stock with the investment goal of a relatively stable income yield rather than for the potential capital growth goal of a common stock investor. Many preferred issues trade within a dollar or two of their issue price for the long-term.

Of course, as with any investment, some preferred stocks are of a better quality than others. When buying preferred stock, as when buying any stock, it’s important to understand what the company issuing the stock does. But you also need to do a risk analysis, like you would with bonds. In other words how also likely is it that the company will be unable to pay its preferred dividends? One way to determine quality of a preferred stock is to look at the preferred stock’s rating. Like corporate bonds, preferred stocks are rated by Standard & Poor’s or Moody’s.

Where do you find preferred stock? The same place you find common stocks. Take a look at Yahoo! Finance or CNBC. On Yahoo! Finance, preferred stocks are listed by the ticker symbol of the issuing company, followed by an underscore, followed by the letter P, followed by the series letter (if there is one, and there probably is, because companies that issue preferred stocks often have more than one series, using letters of the alphabet to distinguish them). On CNBC, preferred stocks are listed by the company ticker symbol, followed by a vertical PR, followed by a letter indicating the specific issue.

As mentioned previously, preferred stocks will not provide the same long-term returns as common stock or stock mutual funds. However, they can provide an effective form of diversification even in a more aggressive portfolio, where they could perhaps be substituted for cash or guaranteed fixed-income instruments.