Notice To Pay Rent Or Quit: Fill & Download for Free

I’m an attorney who frequently practices landlord/tennant law.Three things:Asking this question here will get you either questionable or flat out wrong advice. You are asking for legal help and the only person who can give that to you is a qualified attorney in your jurisdiction. Call one. Now.No one here knows your jurisdiction so the advice will be wrong. Landlord/tennant law is insanely jurisdiction-specific and the folks who will try to answer this question really, really dont know what they are talking about. See point one above.The best and only advice you should take for this is from a qualified attorney. Again, see point one above.

Tenant owes you $1000 in rent. They aren’t paying on time. You send them a eviction notice to pay $1000 plus late fee or quit and move out with a deadline some fixed number of days after issuing your notice.Tenant direct deposits $200 into your account. Now your notice to pay is incorrect. You have to reissue it for $800 plus the late fee and restart the due date counting. And so it goes.This game can go on for a while.Far better to receive that $200 payment via check or cash, immediately return it, and remind them the due date and their eviction is now even closer.We have rentals in Berkeley California and others have learned the hard way that direct deposit (ACH push) can have drawbacks.On the flip side, if you get permission to do an ACH pull (auto-pay) that means you control when and how much is transferred from them to you. Insufficient funds to pull their payment into your account starts the eviction process.Most folks don’t have the capability to do an ACH pull. Mostly only big service providers (mortgages, utilities, medical, etc) are allowed to pull from customer accounts.

We don’t; in fact we usually couldn’t do that even if we wanted to, as most states require us to serve a notice to vacate before we can even proceed with a formal eviction.That notice you receive directly from the landlord is not an eviction notice. Depending on where you live it might be called something like a notice to “cure or quit”, or just to “quit”, and this is the landlord telling you what you must do to avoid having a legal case filed against you. A notice to vacate is the same as a notice to quit, and this one means that you must move out (plus empty and clean the space and return the keys) within a certain number of days, usually three or five, or you will be formally evicted. A notice to “cure or quit” gives you the additional option to pay what you owe – or fix whatever problem has led to the notice – within those days, to avoid being evicted.Some landlords do actually ask tenants to move, before they even issue their own written notices, but there’s a very good reason why a lot of us don’t. If we’ve reached a point where we’d even contemplate eviction, it means we need to get rid of those people. We could ask, but we’ll have absolutely no way of knowing whether the tenant is actually going to be gone by whatever time they agreed to. If they comply, all is well, but if they don’t, we’re right back where we started. If my tenant hadn’t paid rent on April 1st (under normal non-pandemic circumstances), I could serve them with a five day notice to vacate anytime after midnight on the 2nd. If they didn’t leave by the 6th, I could then file them paperwork with the court to have them evicted. It varies by state and municipality, but in my case they’d be served with the actual eviction notice on the following business day and given a court date within a week or so – though this can take up to two months elsewhere. Typically those tenants would be physically removed by the marshals before the 20th, and unless I eventually get paid for those days through a lawsuit, I’ll have lost 2/3 of a month’s rent.If instead I had simply asked my tenants to leave within five days, their promise to do so would be meaningless in the eyes of the law. Once I determined that they had broken their promise, I’d have to start from scratch by delivering that written notice to vacate and give them an additional five days to comply. That would mean missing out on an additional five days rent, which would be hundreds of dollars in my cheapest unit. Since my goal is to have the evicted tenants removed by the twentieth so I’ll have ten days to clean, paint, and perform repairs in order to move in someone else on the 1st, those five extra days could potentially turn into an extra 25 days, since my leases start on the 1st or 15th. Even if you think these are minor issues, remember that all it takes for a landlord to avoid wasting this time is to serve a written notice immediately.Whether you’re asking about the actual filing in court or the landlord’s own notice, the answer is the same: We don’t ask because a simple verbal agreement isn’t binding in this case, which makes it way too easy for scammers to extend the time they’ll get to live for free or continue trashing a place.