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Breaking A Lease Agreement

By Relocation.com

When you sign a lease agreement, most likely you’ll be signing on for a set period of time, such as six months or one year. That means you’ll have to stay on for this amount of time or risk breaking your lease.

While many people do intend to stay long-term in their apartments or homes (after all, moving all the time can be costly) there are some unforeseen circumstances where you might be forced to break your lease before it us up, such as illness, job loss or other emergencies. If you absolutely have to break your lease agreement, here are some of the things you should consider.

Alternatives:
Before you try breaking your lease, there may be other things you can do first. You can ask your landlord if you can transfer the lease to someone you know (and have them move in and pay off the remaining rent for the lease term) or find a sub letter, who will be your responsibility for the time of the lease. In many cases, landlords hate breaking lease agreements because they don’t want to lose the income from the rent and/or don’t want to be bothered with having to look for tenants. If you make it as easy as possible for them, you may be able to get out of your lease unscathed.

Circumstances When You Can Legally Break Your Lease

There are three main circumstance wherein you can break your lease without penalty:

1)   If the apartment or whom suffers serious damage through natural disasters, crime or other instances through no fault of your own.

2)   If you suffer serious health issues which require you to live in an assisted living facility.

3)   If you are called into active military duty after you’ve signed your lease

In these three cases, you can legally break the lease and your landlord cannot go after you for penalties.

Landlord Deficiencies:
If your landlord has been deficient in his or her duties, then you can also break your lease since he or she is not keeping up their end of the bargain. For example, if you’ve repeatedly sent requests for repairs and they ignore you, or if they’re supposed to pay for the utilities but haven’t (or have been keeping the payment for themselves if you give it to them) then you have just cause to break your lease. Make sure you keep good records (like written or e-mailed requests for repairs, etc.) so you can make your case, in the event that you have to go to small claims court or have been served with other legal documents and actions.

If you just want to break your lease because you want to move somewhere else, because you can’t pay or perhaps going through a divorce or separation, you may find it harder to break your lease. However, first talk to your landlord and offer the aforementioned alternatives, that way you can have a peace of mind when you coordinate other aspects of your move like locating moving companies.

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Tips and Advice When Living with a Roommate

Check out our tips before you move in with a roomie.

By Relocation.com

Living with a roommate is both exciting and daunting. You might have grown up having your own room, or sharing a room with a sibling, but living with a complete stranger is a task that should never be taken lightly. Conflicts arise only when things are unclear. Sometimes anything petty, like eating his or her food, or leaving dirty dishes in the sink can cause many fights.  An important piece of advice: keep communication lines open and be clear about everything with your roommate from the very beginning. This helps to avoid such conflicts and misunderstandings.

Here are some areas where rules must be set so that you and your roommate can maintain a good relationship and keep peace and harmony around your shared apartment.

Personal and “public” stuff.
This must be clear between you and your roommate: which among your stuff is available for common use and which is restricted. Do you share your books and CDs? Will you allow your roommate to use your kitchen utensils? Are you sensitive about the use of your shaver? These are some of the issues that must be addressed.

Visiting hours.
Your apartment building may set their own time for this, but you and your roommate must also agree with regards to your own apartment. Issues to address include: What time is considered to be available as visiting hours? Who may be accepted as visitors? How long can guests stay over?

Entertainment.
Some people love loud music while others don’t. Some like TV, while some hate it. Be sure to have an agreement as to how loud s the music can be played inside the room at up to what time should the television turned on. You might have to battle on who takes control of the remote.

Housekeeping schedule.
If you don’t have any experience in housekeeping, it may be a pain. This time it’s a necessity for both of you to keep it clean. Your mother won’t be around to pick  up after you. Make an agreement on the assignment of tasks and a schedule: Who deals with cleaning the floor, putting out the trash, dishes? The important thing is to be fair.

Lights out.
It is important to set a time for the lights out so both of you may properly manage the time. You may follow different timelines for your stuff, so plan your schedule. Say, activities that may need lighting should be done early on so that you will not need to go beyond your scheduled lights out time.

Bills payment.
There are cases where you may have to pay for some bills like water, electricity, as well as cable and internet. Since you might be sharing the use of these, be clear on how you would split the bill for each.

Kitchen and toilet supplies.
Have an agreement on how you will purchase or use your toilet or kitchen supplies. You may decide whether you should take care of buying your own supplies or just splitting the cost of those between each other.

It will save you a lot of trouble if you can arrive at a consensus on the areas enumerated above. Make sure that you always have an open line of communication with each other. Be proactive and take time to discuss problems with your roommate as soon as possible. Both of you should be able to live in peace and harmony.

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Tips for a Successful Roomate Search

Be precise, your room and roommate search will be easier.

By EasyRoommate.com

Searching for a room or roommates is a bit more complicated than trying to find an apartment rental.  Apartments are easy, you find a place you like, and if you qualify for it financially, it’s yours (most of the time).  With room rentals, and when trying to find a roommate for your spare rooms, you have to deal with other issues like different personalities,  sharing bills and groceries — all in a small space. Before any lease is signed, you will have to meet your new roommate. Here’s are some tips to find the house mate of your dreams.

Nice to Meet You:
The meeting phase is usually toward the end of the room/roommate search, so how do you get there efficiently?  Your first step is to start searching on a roommate service that specializes on room and roommate matching.  When you are entering your information on what and who you are looking for, be precise.  When you’re looking for a room, if you are a smoker, enter it in your information as a smoker, if you have a pet that will come along with you, put that in as well.  These specific attributes are important to note because they are not compatible with every person, however, there are people that would be a perfect match for you. Be sure not to leave any information unanswered; this will only waste your time and those of the renters.

Be Specific With What You Want/Don’t Want:
When renting a room out, the rules are the same, if you do not want a smoker, put down no smokers allowed if you don’t want pets, put that down as well.  Of course, smokers and pets are the primary examples I am using, but this applies to any aspect of your search.  Some people don’t believe in this, where they put a very broad search criteria or advertisement, and wait for people to contact them.  Does this work, yes, if you are willing to get numerous phone calls and emails of people that don’t match what you really want.  Would you rather get 50 people contacting you, but then have to spend the time to turn 40 of them down, or get 10 contacts in which they are all good possibilities?  Think of the time you will save yourself, and those searching.

Make a Roommate Contract:
Now that you have narrowed down your possible rooms and roommates, what do you do now?  You should establish some basic guidelines — much like a contract — that you will discuss with potential roommates.  Discuss their work hours, how the bills/rent will be paid, who will clean and on what days, talk about guests and what time they can come over, appropriate noise levels, etc. Again, these are just examples, but the key point is to bring up anything that you would be against right upfront before you actually sign a lease.  It is better to discover that you will not be compatible roommates before are actually living together.

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