Mods, if this needs to be adjusted, please let me know. The information is important and should be out there, and I'll be happy to adjust as needed, including posting to another sub.
This is really a cautionary tale from something that's happening in my life right now.
A friend - we'll call him Lee - is having a rough time, and they've asked my wife and me if he and his wife can stay with us until September 12, when he gets his SSDI check.
Rewind to almost 20 years ago:
Lee and his then-roommate Roger had another friend, Clement. Lee and Roger were sharing an apartment, and everything was going fine. Clement found himself down on his luck, and asked Lee and Roger if he could stay with them for a couple of weeks. As a measure of good faith, he gave them $50.
Then Clement never paid them another dime.
Reasonably, they told him to pack his stuff and leave. But Clement had done some homework, and he found out that by accepting his "initial payment" of $50, Lee and Roger had unknowingly entered into a tenant-landlord relationship with Clement, and in order to get him to leave, they would have to go through the courts.
They lost money from having to file court papers, of course. But they also lost money in the form of higher bills, because Clement would purposely run out the hot water when he took a shower. It's like he was maliciously doing what he could to screw them over in every way possible.
This lasted for 90 days, which was the requisite time from filing to eviction. In the interim, Lee and Roger ate out every day to keep Clement from taking their food from the fridge. This cost them more money, of course.
When the time came, the Constable came out to evict Clement, and it went smoothly.
But in a last "screw you" to Lee and Roger, Clement went to the apartment office and told the manager what had happened. The manager then voided Lee and Roger's lease, because legally, they had been sub-letting, which violated the terms of the lease. So Lee and Roger were also evicted, and had to find a new apartment.
So now, we're back to today.
Lee has asked my wife and me if we'll allow them to "live with us until the 12th" (his exact words), at which point he will give us an unspecified amount of money.
I see a bamboozle coming.
I'm not falling for it.
Try to learn from other's mistakes, folks.
Submitted August 28, 2018 at 10:36AM by AngusVanhookHinson https://ift.tt/2PLejYb
