How To Know If You Are Paying Too Much For Your Apartment

By Francine Fluetsch on May 28, 2016

image via www.theguardian.com

Renting an apartment off campus is usually done in a stressed out haze. After being on the hunt for a place for a while, you and your group are going to pounce on a place that meets most of your requirements the first chance that you get, since you don’t want to lose it to someone else.

The problem with this is, we don’t get enough time to stop and think it all the way through. What if the place sounded awesome, is really nice, but you are paying too much for it? Here are some ways to figure out if your rent should actually be as high as it is, and if it’s too high, it might be time to look for a new place.

Word of mouth:

Talk to your neighbors! Your fellow student neighbors all have different landlords, so if their place is similar to yours, ask them how much they are paying a month. If the amounts are close, then that could be a standard for the area. If, however, their rent is far lower than yours, you might be getting ripped off.

Make sure to ask a few other people to see if that person just had a really chill landlord, or if the standard is usually lower and the landlord you got stuck with just wanted to see how high they could go. Landlords know that students are desperate for places to live, and some of them take advantage of this. If you are paying $500 more than all the people around you, that is not okay and you should really look into other options.

A Google search:

While we usually use the Internet to look up cat videos and watch Netflix, you can also use it to do a Google search on your place and do some snooping. You can check the value of it online, when it was built, and can even look up old photos to see if any renovations have been done over the years.

If your rent is higher than most people in your neighborhood but you have brand new appliances, that could solve the mystery. Landlords don’t tend to do renovations very often, even when it’s badly needed, so take a look around the place and see if it has been changed since the place was built. If it hasn’t and your rent is really high, they are really milking the money out of you.

One of my friend’s places had a gas leak, and the landlord insisted on fixing it himself, and she was terrified to live there. Gas leaks are no joking matter. If your landlord is charging a lot and is a “fix it yourself” type of person, it might be time to look into a new place. You want to be paying for quality, not some dump that could kill you at any second.

The perks:

There are some perks that places have which make them more desirable and therefore more expensive. Does your place have enough of these to justify the price of it? Perks include: Being close to campus, a washer and dryer in unit, a dishwasher, a personal parking space, ability to sublet, safe neighborhood, close to nightlife — you know, things like that.

If you tally it up and your place hits most of them, it might be priced fairly. If, however, it hardly hits any of the points but you’re still paying almost double what someone on the other side of town is paying, then you are definitely getting played.

When it’s just not worth it …

Technically speaking, a month’s rent is supposed to be 30 percent of your monthly income, but most jobs students can get while going to school full-time only pay minimum wage, meaning that we should be getting places that only charge about $500 a month, which isn’t happening, no way, no how.

And if you happen upon a place that is only $500 a month, chances are something is very, very wrong with it. If you are scraping by month-to-month trying to afford your place, it’s going to take a toll on you, and you already have enough to deal with. Consider adding more roommates to the mix to get the cost lower for everyone.

Having your whole paycheck go towards rent isn’t even an option since you still have to feed yourself and save up to pay off your dreaded loans. If your landlord doesn’t allow you to add more roommates (a lot don’t because they don’t want more than four people living there), then it is time to find a place that will allow it, where you will actually be able to get a place where your share of the rent can amount to $500 or less. This is still a lot, but so much better than paying $1,200 a month for a dinky apartment that is constantly breaking down. You need to make sure that your place is worth it to you, and that you aren’t working countless hours just to be handing everything over to your landlord.

These adulting things are really hard and stressful, but you definitely want to make sure that you are getting a fair price for what you are living in. Don’t settle, there is always a way to make the situation better!

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