I’ll try to keep this brief. Our lease ends at the end of this month, APRIL. my wife and I have not signed anything to renew any lease whatsoever. We submitted our notice on April 3rd and our last will be May 31st.
They are telling me that per our “contract” that we have to pay for the full month of JUNE as well. Even though our actual contract ends April 30th. And we are doing a month to month for May (this is what happens when you don’t sign or renew the lease) So we have not signed a new contract or agreed to anything, we gave a move out notice, and they’re telling us no.
I also have all documents and “receipts” to back up this claim.
As a former loan officer, I would caution against leaving unsettled debt even if you’re in the right. They can and will report you to a collection agency because the agency buys that collection amount from the rental company (and hope to get to collect more than they bought the debt for originally).
It doesn’t actually cost the rental company anything, but it will damage your credit (and contrary to popular belief, no collection records just disappear from your credit history). You’ll also then have a harder time finding new housing.
OP, talk to a lawyer.
Actually, how does contested debts work with the US credit system ? People do genuine mistake which may be settled quickly sometimes even without needing to escalate far, but there is also bad faith companies/landlord which charge abusive fee, and would try to go to collections while your still contesting.
As far as I can recall, there will simply be a note on your credit report that the collection is contested. For the small credit union where I worked, contested or not, you were disqualified for all loans and credit.
I haven’t worked in that industry in 15 years now, but I don’t imagine much has changed.
I hate our credit system and I think it needs to be torn down. It’s predatory and we don’t even attempt to educate people about how it works (or we didn’t when I was in school).
There’s a disagreement about what’s owed. That’s what civil courts are for. If they want to go that route, then talk to a lawyer, or if the amount is less than a lawyer would cost, then pay it.
Right, but they can still damage your credit first. Also, lawyers aren’t cheap and your time isn’t free. Better not to take a flippant approach to this.
Personal experience: some apartment we’d been renting gave us back our whole security deposit, which we weren’t expecting, because cat. But yay!
Couple months pass, they get hold of us and are all “Wait a second, you owe us $1200, because we have to replace the carpet.”
I imagine we could have just told them to pound sand at that point, but we’d started thinking about getting a mortgage preapproval, and didn’t want this to be a problem. So we agreed to pay them $50/month.
We paid them like five times over the course of ten months. They’d send us angry letters, and we’d finally send them a check.
The moment we got a mortgage approved, we stopped paying them. They sent a couple more angry letters, which we ignored. Never heard a thing about it again. Nothing happened with credit reports. No civil suit.
As above, if it’s “two months notice,” and OP was shy on that by three days, the most they could possibly owe is three days’ rent.
Nothing will happen if OP does not pay them. Can something happen? Sure, something very very small. But it won’t. And there’s zero harm in finding out. Worst case, old landlord sells the debt to collections for Pennie’s on the dollar, OP clears it with collections for nickels on the dollar, still coming out way ahead.
If the wording is to give notice by a specific date of the month (say 25th) for it to count, it does not matter if OP is one day late.