This is what your rent money goes to

Don't mess with college kids–what they lack in financial resources, they make up for in social alliances.

Let's face it, we're all getting a bit tired of tipping culture. The Girl Scouts at the grocery store want a tip, our cable guy wants a tip, and now it seems that even our landlords want a piece of the gratuity.

I can still remember that one landlord who was so stingy that it was almost remarkable he owned any land at all. The roof had been leaking for months, and one night it began cascading down the wall like a small waterfall. I called my perpetually absent landlord up but he never answered. Voicemail… great. He never did fix that roof and I ended up moving, but I can understand what having a cheap landlord is like. A couple of college students were living together throughout their semester, and the…

Landlords have a nasty little habit of thinking they own you. As a renter, you're obligated to pay their mortgage and puff up a landlord's retirement fund, but at the end of the day, we owe them nothing but what's written on our lease. No landlord is entitled to claim your property–ever.

We all get a little delulu at times and act according to what we truly think is the right way. Only from stepping away, gathering empathy, and really taking a good look at the entire picture do you have your epiphany that maybe, just maybe, you were getting a little out of hand there. Unfortunately, there are many people out there who, for some reason or another, cannot take those steps towards self realization and they make it everyone around them's problem. That is exactly what happened with…

It pays not to be a jerk—well, being a jerk can also pay because the annoying ethical limitations of kind and empathetic folk won't bother you, leaving you to do whatever, whenever, and wherever you want. Still, we'd like to think that all of that bad karma will come back to bite you eventually and that one day you'll receive your just deserts. That may be what happened to this apartment manager, who decided to be unbearably rude to someone who was applying for an apartment. Whatever it was, th…

Landlords are the worst. Those monopolizers that took over entire neighborhoods to exploit us poor folks keep taking two-week vacations instead of fixing the dang toilet seat like we asked them to a month ago. Obviously for most landlords, renters and their well-being is an afterthought. It doesn't matter if there's paint over the door hinges or mold growing in the bathroom, as long as they get that check every month.

Relationships with landlords are often rocky, unstable, and riddled with undertones of ego, making it difficult to solve issues when they inevitably arise. In this case, OP was living in a large old Victorian house that was converted into about 4-5 individual apartments. The issue that arose was an exhaust pipe that was melting away thanks to the landlord's incompetence when he was installing the HVAC system. The landlord hadn't called a professional, opting instead to do it all by himself. Whe…

It's funny because it's true.

If there's one thing that makes landlords drool, it's finding a way to keep your deposit—not that they'll actually use that money to fix anything before the next tenant moves in… Hell, the next tenant will be lucky if even their move-in cleaning fee actually gets used to clean the place up before they arrive. (It wouldn't be the first time a cleaning fee ended up in a landlord's pocket.) When things get ugly in a landlord-tenant relationship, it's always going to be the deposit that gets held o…