Bill Springer: Fill & Download for Free

I have a friend who found himself in this exact situation. There are many answers here telling you not to stop paying rent.These answers are misguided.However; first- a caveat. I am not an attorney and I’m not offering you legal advice. This is simply based on my experience in California. Your state may be completely different.If your landlord has filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, that is liquidation. At this point, he is not paying his bills anymore. He is in court-mandated receivership. Creditors are and will be paid based on an order that the court determines. Mortgage lenders are not the highest of that priority. As a result, it is likely that his mortgage is not being paid, but the pending eviction/sale of the property may not happen until the proceedings are finished.Here’s the point. You don’t care about his financial situation. You just don’t want to end up like my friend. In order to do that, you need to understand a couple of things:You are an unsecured creditor and you WILL lose your deposit and any prepayments (such as “last months rent”). It sucks but you get hosed.The property you are in may be repossessed by the bank and sold.You need to get out in front of these issues. The first thing to get out in front of is to calculate what you spent on deposits and pre-payments. If it were me, I would withhold rent payments that total the amount that you will be screwed out of as an unsecured creditor. As an example:When you moved in, you paid $2000 for 1st months rent, $2000 for last months rent, and a $2000 security deposit. Your total exposure is $4000 (last months rent and your deposit). I would stop paying rent for two months, and instruct the landlord to use your last months rent and deposit for those rental payments. If he initiates eviction proceedings you have a strong case that you are not failing to pay rent, you are simply reallocating your current resources to ensure you do not lose everything in the pending bankruptcy. Your eviction case will likely even be tied in as a “related matter” and thus will be dealt with at the same time.The simple fact is that you are not going to get this money back. Unless you actively like being hosed out of your hard-earned money, then you need to protect yourself.Additionally, I would start looking for a new place to live. Immediately. You do not want to live under the threat of having to move out in a short period of time through no fault of your own.My friend lost his entire deposit and last-months rent. He was out over $6000. He also had filed a small claims court case, won it, and then the case was summarily discharged in bankruptcy. There was no further recourse. Good luck and, as always, consult a local attorney for solid legal advice and don’t listen to people on the internet.

My family was conservative, but I never paid too much attention to politics until I was old enough to vote. In 1998 I can recall that I voted for democrats, republicans, and third party candidates.Then there was the 2000 election. It was obvious from watching the debates that Bush had no clue what he was doing and was totally unqualified for the office of president. That election made me suspect that republicans valued ideology over competence.Then in 2003 republicans did an illegal, unconstitutional second redistricting in Colorado (you can find details by googling for Colorado midnight gerrymander). It featured such antics as getting around the requirement that a bill be read multiple times on the floor by dividing it up between several staffers and having them all read at once. This convinced me that the republican party had no ethics and was interested only in power.I haven’t yet seen anything to change that view.I want to be clear here that I’m not talking about individual voters - I know good, honest people who are (or used to be) republicans whom I’m happy to have as friends. I respect that *conservatives* have something to contribute to our policies.I do believe that the modern republican *party* is set up so as to mostly exclude anyone who might have a good sense of ethics from holding office. I don’t identify as a democrat, but after the crap the republicans pulled in 2003 I said I’d never vote for one again until I saw some sign that the party was returning to ethical behavior, and I’m still waiting.

I’m not a vengeful person, so I don’t have any stories about killing someone or robbing their house. However, occasionally someone seriously needs a small dose of instant karma!About ten years ago, I rented a townhome from Scott. Scott wasn’t a bad landlord, and after two years I delivered my notice, and requested my full security deposit back.I left Scott’s townhome in tip-top shape. I was anal-retentive about getting the place ready for the next renter. I spackled and painted; I had a carpet and floor cleaning company shampoo everything, etc.After moving out I waited patiently for my security deposit to come back in the mail. After spending so much time getting his townhome in perfect rental condition, I was shocked to see that Scott retained almost all of my security deposit. The biggest charge? Cleaning fees. Cleaning fees for the job I already did.I wrote back challenging him, and he begrudgingly returned an additional meager portion of my deposit, although he admitted in the letter that the place was left in great condition.Now I was irate. I deserved it all back! There was nothing left to do!!!This time I wrote back threatening legal action. Again, he returned a small amount, but this time told me if I wanted the remaining money to go ahead and sue him. Of course, he knew it wasn’t worth the hassle for me to follow-through with a small-claims lawsuit for such a small amount. He won that round.So he thought.Around this time the iPhone 3G S was released. It’s popularity was enormous. Unopened phones sold online for at least several hundred dollars, and often much more. There was crazy demand and almost no supply.I decided Scott had a phone to sell.I created a Craigslist “for sale” ad for good ol’ Scott:“Brand new unopened iPhone 3G for sale. I received this phone as a gift from my grandson and do not know or understand how to use it. Sadly I need to sell it to pay my bills. $175, cash only. Call Scott at 555–5555. If the ad is still up, the phone is still available.”Scott received 500 phone calls and texts every 15 minutes for the next two days, and finally disconnected his phone number.I tested the call volume by running a similar ad and plugged in my friends number. We received so many calls we couldn’t keep up! All we could do was answer and say “hold please” over and over. He received over 500 hundred calls and texts in less than 15 minutes. We had to shut his phone off, delete the ad and wait two days before the calls finally stopped coming in.It took my old landlord about 36 hours to get the ad taken down from Craigslist.Revenge is a dish best served cold.