It’s more expensive out there than ever
I’ve been trying to encourage my oldest step-son to take the plunge and get his own place. The biggest problem that we can see at this point though is that all of the apartments for rent in the area are way beyond his budget! I just cannot even imagine how kids today are supposed to be able to get started in life if they can’t even afford to rent their own apartment! I can remember when I was first out on my own it wasn’t that hard to find a place.
The biggest drawback at the time was that landlords don’t like to rent to people with cats or dogs. They don’t mind fish or birds, but cats and dogs have a tendency to tear up the carpets and walls and it is expensive to repair the damage. I was lucky, though, my first landlord was willing to let me get a dog as long as I agreed to take it to obedience training. So that is exactly what I did. I bought a cute little puppy and hired an obedience training company to come to my apartment every morning and pick up the puppy and take it to their place and train the puppy all day, and then bring the puppy back to my place in the evening. It worked out very well and the dog was well trained.
I think that the key to that success was to establish a good rapport with the landlord and offer extra security deposit for damages that might be incurred. Fortunately for me there were no damages because of the pet. The big problem that I had with this particular landlord came, however, after I moved out. I had paid my rent until the end of the month but moved out before the month was over. I had asked my sister to come in and clean the place for me the day after I moved out, but before she could get there the landlord went in and cleaned it and charged me money for the cleaning! And the landlord threw away some things that my sister wanted to keep! So we were quite unhappy with that situation, as you can imagine – being charged a cleaning fee for throwing away things I wanted kept!