Failure To Pay Rent Only: Fill & Download for Free

He is Karthik Rajaram.Little bit of background about him:-Civil Engineering from IIT Madras.MBA from UCLA.Financial Analyst at Los Angeles.You can easily make it out that he was a topper.His Property evaluation (in 2006) was $12 million.On 5 Oct 2008, he committed suicide after shooting his entire family.Shocked???Wondering that once a topper, why he did took his life and his family also.He was involved in the stock market. During the Great Recession, the stock market collapsed and he was “broke,” having lost most of his assets in the plummeting stock market. He sold his house to pay for the loss. he rents a flat but again not able to pay rent on time. And finally, he killed himself along with his own family.In a suicide note, Karthik Rajaram wrote that he had considered killing only himself because of his financial troubles, but decided to take his family with him. He wrote “this was the best solution for him and his family”..What can we learn from his case?Handling failure is more important than success as it teaches us more. Because failure and success are the two sides of life. And we should know, how to handle both in a unique way.

I used to live in South Dakota. We had a huge blizzard over Christmas that shut down the region for several days. At the end of the storm the city came through and started ticketing and towing cars that were parked on the street. Since our poor inner city neighborhood had very limited parking most cars were ticketed and towed because people had nowhere to put them. I got a crew together to dig out cars and get the cars into a local church parking lot. The police came and asked me to stop. I was told that the revenue from the tickets paid for the snow removal. Yes the city of Sioux Falls charges fines from it’s poorest citizens to pay for a public benefit like snow plows. I later learned that more than 10% of the cars towed from our neighborhood during snow removal were unclaimed by their owners who were unable to pay the fines. This too added into the snow removal budget.Of course the law is intended to control behavior, but the end result impacts the poor more than anyone else. Take for instance speeding. We all do it, but a $200 ticket for speeding may result in a poor person not being able to pay rent or eat. A wealthy person simply pays the bill and shrugs it off. I’ve known people who end up in jail for months for failure to pay a traffic ticket. They get out of jail with no job, no place to live and a whole lot of anger.Then there are laws that directly intend to affect the poor or homeless. It is literally illegal for someone to sleep anywhere in a public place in our city. A homeless person can be fined for sleeping on a park bench, on the sidewalk, behind a dumpster or down by the river. Usually the ticket is $150 per instance. a lot of homeless will collect these until they have too many and end up in jail. Now squatting in a house carries a fine of $450, but it takes six months to evict a squatter, costs the landlord thousands and can only be fined once. It’s usually safer and cheaper to squat in someone’s home than it is to camp by the river.I digress.Poverty stinks and the laws are made by the rich.America for the rich people, by the rich people and of the rich people.To heck with everyone else… or so it seems.

I will focus on residential instead of commercial landlord/tenant. Commercial law is different from residential law.In Pennsylvania, self-help eviction, which includes changing the locks, is illegal. Doing such a thing could cause the landlord to be responsible for financial damages to the tenant. If a tenant fails to pay the rent, the landlord is required to go through the appropriate eviction process.The first day that your rent is late, the landlord can begin the eviction process. Late will depend on your lease. Many leases give a 5 day grace period, some do not. At 7 days late, it would not surprise me if you are eligible for eviction under any lease.The process begins with a Notice to Quit, also called an eviction notice. A Notice to Quit informs the tenant of the breach and informs them what actions they must take to resolve the problem. In this case, the problem is failure to pay rent, so the solution is to pay or leave by a certain date. In PA, the time period to pay rent from the date that the tenant is informed or a notice is posted is 10 days. This includes weekends and holidays. The lease may allow for a longer or shorter time period, so the lease will control. The lease may also alter the process somewhat, but it cannot eliminate some of the safeguards.At this point, the tenant can either pay in time or leave. If the tenant does neither, the landlord can then go to the next part of the process. That is, the landlord files in court for an unlawful detainer. An unlawful detainer is when a tenant neither pays nor leaves. The landlord has to win this case and then have a sheriff or constable remove the person. The landlord may not change the locks, shut off utilities, physically remove the tenant themselves, so on. They have to go through the appropriate legal process.Understand, if you do leave, you are still responsible for the rent under the terms of the lease. And the landlord can pursue you for that and costs. If you do not leave, the landlord can also seek the costs of removing you when they sue you.This article is helpful on the subject Eviction Notices for Nonpayment of Rent in PennsylvaniaIn Pennsylvania, there is free legal assistance for people who meet certain financial qualifications and need help with landlord/tenant issues. I suggest you search for Legal Aid or Free Legal Assistance in your county.