We have got to try to get in touch with our renter, she still owes us money and is late. She has been paying abysmally lately. She showed up the day after her rent was due with $500 which of course is late meaning that a $60 late charge will be tacked on to her bill, then 5 days later she came and she paid us another $400 (total $900) and since she still owes on the water bill and rent balance this means approximately another is $500 due to clear up December and of course January is less that 2 weeks away. We haven't heard a word from her yet so hopefully we will hear something from her today or tomorrow. I know it's Christmas time and since I don’t know or care about their religion I don’t know if they celebrate holiday but my guess is they do, well actually she did mention that she was preparing for it at one point so I would say it is something they celebrate.
I know in the past when Christmas arrives previous renters have put their holiday ahead of their rent which usually puts us (me and my husband) in a bind because we don’t make enough money to supplement another family. We still have a mortgage to pay and we don't make any money on that house (in fact we lose money every month) and we certainly can’t call our mortgage company and say “We can't pay this month because he need to pay other bills and please don’t give us a bad mark, after all our renters need to celebrate Christmas."
The other house, our rental property, was our house that we had moved into around 1995 and in 2008 we moved out when we purchased our new home (which wasn't a "new" house by any means), the one where we are currently living. We had plans of selling the other home but then the Republicans and the 1 Percenters put an end to that notion when they destroyed the economy with the crash of the housing industry. My husband’s wealthy sister (not quite part of the 1%, yet) told my husband we should keep the house until the market improved and then sell it after things returned to normal, in the meantime we could rent the place. This was only possible because we were purchasing our current home privately through a friend who agreed to personally finance us for 5 years and at the end of that period we had to obtain bank financing. If we weren't able to get the loan then since we still owned the other house we would simply return our current home to our friend and move back to the old place. We were rather lucky because if not for his holding the loan there is no way we would have been able to keep both homes. We obtained financing by the skin of our teeth because at that time I was handling our money, and not my husband, because believe me had he been handling it we would never have gotten a loan. It was around the time of his first heart attack and I had (fortunately for us at the time) assumed responsibility for the bills and was shocked by our financial condition. We were screwed.
This was all about eight years ago and here we are in 2016 and the market has not improved. One could claim we were starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel thanks to all the efforts by the Obama administration. Now we will have to face Trump who has said he is going to erase all the things the Democrats and Progressives have done to restore order to the chaos the rich created so I guess we will never be able to get rid of that house. Recall that Trump was excited for and bragged about how a dying economy and housing market would only benefit him actually hoping it would happen because it would make him richer than ever. So since in benefits the 1% to keep the rest of us financially strapped it looks like my husband and I are going to be stuck with that money sucking whore of a house forever.
While property values in that neighborhood have been creeping up the fact of the matter is that the house is worth less than we owe by about $30,000. The houses in the neighborhood before the crash were going for almost double their current value so we really got screwed by Big Banking and Wall Street and they didn’t even say “Thank You” as they pulled out.
The mortgage is about $1,260 on the house and we charge $1,200 so we actually lose $60 every month, unless the renter is late then we break even because the late fees makes up the loss but of course we always find ourselves struggling to come up with the balance or even sometimes the whole mortgage when our tenants are late because of reasons like Christmas, or a birthday party, or just because they were short on cash. The worst thing is when the renter doesn’t say anything to us. We all have problems and all have other obligations that sometimes just have to come first but I don’t care who is in that house I have always told them just be honest with us and let us know that you are going to be late so we can figure things out. I don’t know if they believe it or not but I tell them that we actually lose money and the only reason we don’t walk away from that house is because we don’t want to ruin our credit (AGAIN - I usually don’t say again though). I sometimes think that since most the people we rent to aren't the best off financially they think since we have a house to rent that we are these rich fat cats that can float them if need be but the truth is we don't have a dime to spare. It is becoming costly simply to maintain it anymore with nearly 10 years of neglect by careless tenants. Financially and structurally things are getting worse for us because now we have to pay for repairs on things that the renters break and of course we aren’t reimbursed when they move and even if we can keep that lousy $1,200 deposit it never covers the damages (and could NEVER cover the aggravation). We are screwed again.
I was thinking that the current renters in the house had been slightly more reliable than the previous tenants but this last month they are proving that they are probably not reliable at all, making 3 separate payments to result in just one month’s rent. We have actually made some reductions towards the rent because the male renter (her boyfriend she says) has made some repairs so we allowed for their efforts. We really don’t have to do that because when she moved in both he and she saw the problems with the house and were really gung-ho about getting into the house and making the repairs themselves, seriously, they thought it was all stuff they could handle to make it as she put it in her text messages to us “a home again”, they did do work and its only fair to reimburse them for the labor so we have given some deductions. I would like to give more because like I told my husband had we hired someone to do the repairs it would cost us a lot more money than by taking off some of their rent but my husband is less generous than I am in those regards, he'd rather not give them anything and would definitely have given them less that I gave. I have itemized the repairs that they have done (we purchased the supplies) and deducted appropriately but honestly I probably would have given them a few hundred dollars more than he will allow me to give.
When she (our current tenant) first saw the house she said she fell in love with it and said that all it needed was a little bit of tender love and care and she was going to make sure that it got the love and care that it needed but the last time I talked to her there seems to be a slight switch in attitude, they've been in the place 6 months now and she said they still haven't even finished unpacking. She also mentioned that they weren't sure what they were going to when their lease expires. I’m guessing that was her opening to let me know they are not going to stay.
Over the years we have had about 5 different tenants in that house and each and every time they have indicated that they love the house, just like my husband and I fell in love with it when we purchased it over 20 years ago. Sometimes I wish we never left it, it was my husband that wanted to move so damn bad but that's another story. It seems like every time each and every tenant upon moving out have nothing good to say about it anymore (one family called it a death trap! My home I loved for so many years a "death trap". What bullshit!). So my guess is that the current tenants are on the same track. We need to face facts though, at some point we might have to consider walking away from it and just letting the bank have it back regardless of how it impacts my credit. Over the period of each lease the tenants degrade the house further and further and we don't have the money to improve it so its we end up renting to lesser quality people, people with worse credit or no credit, just to get the place rented and they treat the house with even less regard so its this one big huge snowballing effect. The worse the tenant, the worse the house condition, the worse the tenant... and on and on and on...