My apartment complex is pretty relaxed when it comes to rent payments.
Almost too relaxed, if you ask me.
Rent is due on the first of the month, as is true with most apartments. We also get a grace period, like most apartments. But our grace period is a whopping ten days! I’ve never needed a ten day grace period – I always pay on the first, sometimes the second if things are a little crazy. I’m not going to complain about the grace period though. It’s a nice little perk.
What does get me, though, is that they don’t deposit rent checks right away. Nor do they deposit them by the end of the grace period. Frequently, it’s not until the 15th or later that the check shows up. And I know they deposit them at the same bank branch that I bank at, so it’s not just a check clearing delay. Plus, I have called before to make sure they received my payment and they say “Oh, we have, we just haven’t gone to the bank yet.”
I guess this shouldn’t frustrate me, but since I am penalized if my check is late, it would be nice to get some confirmation that they received it. Yes, it’s a small complaint.
I suppose this does indicate that the company is doing well, since they don’t need that money right away. That’s a good feeling.
Megan is a 40-something government employee in the Washington, DC area. She got interested in Personal Finance when she got out of college and realized that her paycheck wasn’t going to go as far as she had hoped. Since starting this blog, she has managed to buy a house and make a solid start on her retirement goals, and hopes to help others do the same. Here is her story:
In 2007, I was a gainfully employed 20-something with no debt but not a lot of knowledge about personal finance. It was a co-worker’s comment about Roth IRAs that sent me to the internet, searching for information. It was then that I realized that I really didn’t know a whole lot about personal finance and that my current financial situation was due a lot to inherent frugal tendencies, generous family members, a fear of debt, and good luck. While that was working for me, clearly I needed a better plan.
While I had no debt, I was also pretty much living paycheck to paycheck and not worrying about going over budget (I say this as if I had a real budget) because I had an emergency fund set aside to cover any overages.
Except that’s not what an emergency fund is for.
So I did a lot of research, read a lot of blogs, and decided that I needed a plan. I needed to budget. I needed to know what I was spending my money on. I needed to prepare for the future.
I decided to create a blog not only to make myself accountable to others but also to share the knowledge that I gained along the way. I’ve learned so much from my fellow bloggers, and I hope that my readers can find something useful in what I have to share as well.
We don’t deal with a company, but our landlord is the same way. Unfortunately, before I took over payments, my parents took such full advantage of the grace period that it was kind of abused — I didn’t have any idea that rent was due on the 15th and not the 26th!!
Now I always pay in the early part of the month, and the landlord still takes more than ten days to deposit. But that’s fine with me. Using ING’s Electric Orange means the account deducts the amount of the check sent without waiting and wondering when I can balance my register!
You’re making me neurotic just reading this post! The whole time I was thinking, “Wait, did I pay my check on time this month? It hasn’t cleared the bank yet…” Our grace period is 5 days, which is pretty nice for those rare occasions that I forget to drop off my check on the 1st. Our landlord has a similarly annoying habit with depositing rent checks. I paid last Thursday, and it still hasn’t cleared. Last month it cleared on the 4th, but I think that’s the earliest it’s ever made it through to my account. Frustrating!