Everyone Should Always Be On The Lease
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It happens time and time again. An apartment resident lets a family member, significant other or close friend live in their apartment without being on the lease or signs a lease for someone else and won’t even be living there. This situation is commonly tumultuous and ends very, very poorly. Either the person completely and irresponsibly bails on paying rent, damages the apartment, moves out before the lease is over with or truly just ruins the responsible and nice person’s rental history who was duped into signing the lease for their irresponsible co-hort.
Guess who is left as the responsible party? The person who signed the lease.
It’s terrible, but it happens so often that it’s ridiculous. The worst part is that it can happen to anyone at anytime, even those who think that their family member or friend would never mess them over. I learned this from personal experience from a friend since childhood and best friend in my adult hood. They had just separated with their wife and asked a huge favor of staying at my place for awhile until he got back onto his feet.
I had an extra room, so I figured it wouldn’t be so bad to have him crash at my place for a few weeks. Well, a few weeks turned into a few months and a few months turned into about a year. He never paid me any rent the entire time and being respectful of his personal space, I never really checked out his room during that time. When he finally moved out and I was checking out the room, I came to determine that he had spilled all kinds of juice and ruined the carpet, put holes in the wall and taken the closet door off of the hinges.
The worst part of the whole ordeal is that because he was never actually on the lease I ended up being held responsible for all of the damage done to the room when I moved out. I had to pay over $1000 in damages for things that I never did. To top it all off, he never paid me for it.
Needless to say, we aren’t friends anymore.
Had I made this person go into the leasing office with me and add his name to the lease, he could be held legally responsible. However, I didn’t do this. I put trust in someone whom I thought I could trust and I got burned in the end.
The moral of the story is to never sign the lease for someone else or let someone live with you without them being on the lease too. Always remember that if they are not on the lease – you will take the fall if they mess up. Not only that, but mistakes and mess-ups of this sort may not only ruin your credit, it could ruin relationships and friendships. Think about that before you allow your sister to crash on your couch for a “few months.”
Just be smart and think things through before you jump into a situation that has the potential of causing headaches and costing you money and friendships.
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