• CountMonte@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Our mortgage is $2600 month. My wife has a much better paying job than me. I make $2200 a month after taxes/deductions. She is currently going through cancer treatments and although everything is looking positive it really got me thinking about what the hell does life look like for my family if something happens to my wife?

    I’ve had the same bus driving job for 23 years. I’m undereducated. A 2 bedroom, 1 bathroom apartment is $1600 month here. I don’t know how I’d ever be able to take care of myself and two kids.

    They want us to have 80k+ in school debt so you can be allowed to have mortgage debt or rent and own nothing. I don’t know where I’m going with this but I’m just bummed out about life right now.

    • DoomBot5@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      That’s what life insurance polices are for. Will be pretty hard to get one with her cancer diagnosis though.

      • Saeveo@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Are you not required to have a joint life assurance policy as a condition of a mortgage in the US?

        • stalfoss@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          lol no, the bank doesn’t care, they’ll just take your house if you can’t pay

          • Corkyskog@sh.itjust.works
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            1 year ago

            You literally beat me to this reply by like 4 minutes haha. Banks were giving variable mortgages to people who could barely afford current rates, they don’t give a shit.

            • shortwavesurfer@monero.town
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              1 year ago

              I would never ever take an adjustable rate mortgage. That is just begging to get fucked. Like right now for example. My mortgage is like 4.2% but if it were an adjustable id be at like 6+% and be out of a house.

              • krische@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                Or when the housing market is booming, they’ll repossess the house and sell it again for even more of a profit.

                • Brandon658@lemmy.world
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                  1 year ago

                  Probably make as much use of the scam mortgage insurance that they can too. I forget what it’s actually called but it’s a scam IMO. $100 a month baked into my escrow for insurance to the lender in case I lost the house. To my knowledge it provides me no benefit.

                  Upside is when I refinanced it was taken off. (Think the whole first time home owner program requires it for the initial loan.)

        • transientDCer@lemdro.id
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          1 year ago

          Not anywhere that I’ve seen, just home owners insurance and mortgage insurance if you pay less than 20% down.

        • Meeech@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Nope, at least not for my mortgage. The only thing that was required was a home owners insurance policy.

        • June@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          I bought last year and there was nothing in the process that wanted either of us to have life insurance.

      • AeonFelis@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Love how everyone in this subthread are sure they all live in the same country with the same rules and same banking system.

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I’m in exactly the same boat as you. Undereducated, lower paying job than my wife, mortgage, etc. I’ve frequently had panicked thoughts about what I would do if she died. And we have a kid, which makes it even worse.

      • Riven@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        1 year ago

        Part of the reason my partner and I don’t want kids. It’s almost impossible to raise them alone and she has a preexisting condition that she wouldn’t want to pass on to them. If she passes away I could always just go live in my car by the beach and be fine. Wouldn’t be able to do that very well with a kid.

      • solstice@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Consider term life insurance? (Not whole life which is a ripoff.) It’s usually pretty cheap for a 20 year policy that’ll give you a few hundred grand if the worst happens. Like literally $20-$50/month. I’m not a salesman, don’t work in insurance, just a suggestion.

          • solstice@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Flying squids family seems to be OK, that user was responding to the guy with cancer wife. Not too late for them I don’t think.

          • trexman@sh.itjust.worksOP
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            1 year ago

            Yeah, if you’re in your 20s and reading this, and your healthy, get term life insurance now. Get it while it’s go out to dinner cheap. I’m 43 on medication due to congenital issues and mine is $350 PER MONTH!

    • HamSwagwich@showeq.com
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      1 year ago

      You need to move to someplace you can afford.

      The OP is another example… You can live alone in many places, but they chose to live in an expensive area. You can’t complain about that and be taken seriously. I want to live in Beverly hills… but I can’t afford it, so I don’t live there.

      • ZzyzxRoad@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        This is such a bullshit take. I’m not even going to address why because you already know. Yes, I’m sure the place they’re talking about with $1600/month rent is fucking Beverly Hills, you jackass. Lmfao

      • habanhero@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        OP’s Mortgage: $2600/month

        You: “I want to live in Beverly hills… but I can’t afford it, so I don’t live there.”

        Out of touch with reality? Check.

        • Corkyskog@sh.itjust.works
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          What really blows is when I bought my house 8 years ago, it was affordable. I now make almost 40% more and there is no way I could afford the same house. Mortgage, taxes and insurance (including flood insurance because the NFIP sucks) is less than $1,400. Once PMI is removed, it will be closer to 1,300, and once we finally remove flood insurance (because we are inland and the maps are outdated) it will be less than $1,100 a month.

          I just don’t see how millennials find homes anywhere remotely desirable in this market.

          • Klanky@sopuli.xyz
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            1 year ago

            Even back at the end of 2019, we managed to find a house in a decent area that we could afford on my $60K/yr job. The mortgage was only $100 more a month than we were paying for a TINY “2” bedroom apartment. We managed to use our state’s first time homebuyer program to get a grant to pay to remove the PMI up front, which was a big help. I now make more money but I really think we couldn’t afford our house now (at least at the price online website estimate). It’s crazy and we never want to move if we can avoid it!

            • Corkyskog@sh.itjust.works
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              1 year ago

              I have a “starter house” but in a very desirable town, it’s possible it might make someone more money to tear down and build a mcmansion. We will probably want to move, which is fine because bigger houses aren’t that much more expensive. Once the mcmansions hit the market during the lull, they never went away. It’s just no one is willing to pay 650k+ for them. So now they are in the 450k range, it has driven down the price of reasonably large and or older big farm style homes down. So now my 170k property is worth like almost 250k and the house that would have been 400k, is around 325 to 350. Those two events basically closed the gap significantly.

          • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            My daughter is only 13 but we’re already expecting she’s going to spend her 20s with us because of this.

          • aesthelete@lemmy.world
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            I just don’t see how millennials find homes anywhere remotely desirable in this market.

            It’s a strange market to be sure, but one way or another I think it’ll end. Either mortgage rates go way, way down, or prices, or both in the medium to long term.

        • SCB@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          A $2600/month mortgage is like a half million dollar house dude

          They should absolutely move if the wife has cancer.

          • aesthelete@lemmy.world
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            A $2600/month mortgage is like a half million dollar house dude

            Umm…try looking up what $400,000 worth of debt will cost you monthly today (and what your existing equity plus debt and on-hand cash will even buy you in today’s market).

            I wouldn’t move in this market at all if you can make your mortgage payments.

            • SCB@lemmy.world
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              $400,000 will buy you a mansion where I live. My house is worth about half that, and it’s quite nice.

              • aesthelete@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                👏 👏

                Just simply be like this random dude on the Internet…live in his neighborhood and emulate his daily commute…he’s the finest, most shining example.

                Feeling down? Wife got cancer? Relocated from your entire friends, family, and your job? No worries, you’ll have SCB from the Internet to keep you company.

                • SCB@lemmy.world
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                  Or just move literally anywhere in the Midwest with the equity from your half-million dollar home, and buy one for 150k, and get your wife treatment.

                  You can’t possibly be this dumb, so I’m going to assume you had a bad day at work today. Hope it gets better.

                  Uselessly being a dick isn’t going to make it better. Call a friend.

          • gingersneak@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            A 2000 sq ft 3 bed 2 bath in a good neighborhood goes for about that where I live, which is known to be in the lower CoL part of the country. The reason shit is so fucked up is that our overlords at huge mutual funds like Blackrock have bought up all the houses so that they can rent them to serfs and collect perpetual income for almost no risk.

            • SCB@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              known to be in the lower CoL part of the country

              Lol no it is not. I’m not sure why you’d want to pretend it is.

              I actually live in a moderate CoL area and am a homeowner. I could sell my house right now and buy a house not 20 miles away for about half what my current house is worth, which is also not half a million fucking dollars.

              Do you know how insane this sounds to someone from “flyover country?”

              There’s an entire neighborhood going up near me in the 200s. Amazing school system, right outside the city, easy access to parks/lakes/what have you.

              the reason is Blackrock

              Lol no it is not. It is because we restrict what housing can be built where and thus have insufficient housing.

          • habanhero@lemmy.ca
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            Maybe in the boonies but my point is Beverly Hills is not a $2600/month zone and what OP is paying is not unusual.

          • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Where should they move to that houses are less than half a million dollars these days, inner city Detroit?

            • SCB@lemmy.world
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              Or, God forbid, outside of a major city.

              My house is worth mid-200s (now, purchased for 140 about 8 years ago), in a very nice neighborhood. I have a pool, a literal white picket fence, and half an acre of property. My house is among the more expensive areas where I live.

              There’s an entire fucking country away from the coast buddy. Check it out. Or don’t, and only move here when the breadwinner of your family has a potentially-fatal illness and you need to live somewhere less expensive that also has top-tier medical care nearby, which is what I suggested to OP.

      • Maggoty@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        No. No you can’t. There’s only a few bajillion articles since COVID about the unaffordability of housing in all 50 states.

        • HamSwagwich@showeq.com
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          It’s weird that I see houses for sale all over the US in literally every possible price bracket and you don’t.

      • solstice@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        112 downvotes goddamn. Lemmings are so much more savage than redditors, i swear to god.

        I agree a lot of people are going to need to reevaluate their lifestyle and geography settings in the coming decades. Like mass migration level stuff. It sucks and nobody wants to hear it but that’s where we are headed.

        • Cryophilia@lemmy.world
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          There is nowhere that is affordable unless you have a well paying work from home job and you can get a big city salary in a small town. Cheap places have cheap jobs.

          • HamSwagwich@showeq.com
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            Lol that is an outright lie. There are so many places you can live affordably in the US… but people think they need to live in Manhattan and shit

            • Cryophilia@lemmy.world
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              Cheap places have cheap jobs. It’s econ 101. Wages and prices will reach a similar equilibrium everywhere, though obviously there will be a few statistical outliers in both directions, in most cases given free movement of people, housing will cost the same relative to local salaries.

              Remote work is the only thing shaking up this equation.

        • HamSwagwich@showeq.com
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          Haha yeah it’s the antiwork crowd that mostly moved. The ones who blame thier problems on everyone else and refuse to look internally as to what the problem might be and then wonder why nothing ever changes.

          • solstice@lemmy.world
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            What gets me is the rabid hatred for any and all things finance/accounting/economics/business etc. These people have never looked at a balance sheet in their lives and don’t have a clue about anything technical in these fields. And yet they have extremely strong opinions about technical shit they don’t understand, and express these opinions for loudly and confidently. Drives me crazy.

      • aesthelete@lemmy.world
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        I want to live in Beverly hills… but I can’t afford it, so I don’t live there.

        I want to live in Atlantis, but I don’t own a submarine, it’s fictional, and the Atlantis council simply does not prioritize affordable housing,

      • June@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        Lmao, my PITI is 3300/month and I live in a 1000sqft rambler that’s in ok shape in the first city that’s considered affordable outside of the Seattle region. All my job prospects are here or in similar markets, and rent for something comparable isn’t far behind what I’m paying (was paying $3k/month for a 2 bed apartment before buying last year) for my house.

        Are there cheaper markets? Yea. Are there jobs for me in those markets? Lmao, no.

        • Staccato@lemmy.world
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          There’s a reason high paying jobs have to be high paying. It’s really tied to the local rent.

          The only issue is a lot of those careers still put people through some underpaid grunt or trainee role before they can earn a living wage…

      • billy_bollocks@sh.itjust.works
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        Not sure why everyone is downvoting you. Rural areas are significantly cheaper, assuming you can find a job there. I say this as someone who just built a house in rural Oregon 45 mins outside of PDX

        Plus you can help do your part by turning their shitty little red county purple.

      • jikel@lemm.ee
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        This is good option if you can work online. If everyone moves out from cities to countryside the market would stabilize or collapse, meanwhile the countryside would improve and have more amenities, that require more jobs there and other people can move in. It would be hard in the beginning…

        PS: I imagine there are no such problems in the countryside yet

        • Mac@mander.xyz
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          10 months ago

          I personally just drive 25 minutes to work because I don’t have any skills that allow me to work from home.

    • Pokethat@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Do what you want cause a pirate is free, you are a pirate! 🎶🎵🎶

      • EzekielJK@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I remember the first time I ever saw that video was when I tried playing Enter the Gungeon. I didn’t even pirate it. I just screwed up when I was installing some mods lol

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      Yup. Adobe may not be the ones causing the housing crisis, but all this nickel and diming from other sources is part of the problem too.

      Hey Adobe, if you want people to stop pirating your shit go back to a pay-once model or lower your subscription costs. Then maybe use some of that money you’ve got to help us out over here so we can afford to pay you.

  • _number8_@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    it is FUCKING INSANE that apartments get to ask for all sorts of invasive shit like this and that’s just fine. yeah god forbid you take on any risk, we’re only committing to fucking thousands a month, fuck you.

    • aesthelete@lemmy.world
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      Nowadays too they often require renter’s insurance so they can get money from the insurance company if you leave too many peasant droppings on the floor during your stay.

      • CoderKat@lemm.ee
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        Naw, tenants insurance is entirely reasonable in my book. That’s not meant for small things. That’s meant for huge disasters like if you cause a fire that burns down the entire building. The liability insurance is the only part they usually care about. Fortunately, it’s usually relatively cheap, too.

        If you didn’t have insurance, they’d just need more insurance themselves and they’ll pass that buck on to you. At least with renters insurance, you can get some coverage for your personal belongings, too.

        • aesthelete@lemmy.world
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          If you didn’t have insurance, they’d just need more insurance themselves and they’ll pass that buck on to you.

          I honestly think they should be prevented from just transparently passing every single cost of ownership (as well as most of their responsibilities) onto renters, but I’m also American so I understand what you’re saying here.

          • solstice@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            I’m curious how you think business works? Like what do you think businesses do, besides passing costs to customers? If they didn’t price their expenses into their products/services the business wouldn’t survive. Preventing them from doing so is just…childishly naive…

            • aesthelete@lemmy.world
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              It’s true that they have to make more in profit than expenses, but margins aren’t set in stone, except in this country where everyone thinks that not only does already work that way, but that it should.

              In a reasonably regulated industry additional costs may have to be absorbed out of the business’s margin instead of immediately being passed onto the customers.

              The margins are fucking fat in this country, but that won’t stop them from passing every single additional cost onto you again instead of adjusting their margin.

              EDIT: And all of this leaves out the discussion of not only every cost being passed directly onto you, but the responsibilities as well.

              • solstice@lemmy.world
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                The margins are fucking fat in this country

                Do you have data supporting this? I took a few minutes to select a few ginormous American megacorps in various industries and asked chatgpt to help select the best non-US analogs to compare to. Then I pulled up their financial statements and compared some key ratios over a few years: net income / net revenue (profit margin), net income / net equity (return on equity), and net income / total assets (return on assets).

                I looked at Verizon and Vodafone, and then GM and Toyota, before I decided to actually do some real work on this and put some real data together. My results were inconclusive: verizon is kicking vodafone’s ass, but then again telecom is absolutely fucked in this country so no big surprise there. GM and toyota split the metrics pretty evenly; one better in one area, the other better somewhere else.

                So I’m not convinced yet profit margins are abnormally fat in this country compared to international business. It’ll take a lot of data points from a lot of companies over a lot of years to really get a satisfactory picture of whether your point is truly accurate.

                • aesthelete@lemmy.world
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                  I took a few minutes to select a few ginormous American megacorps in various industries and asked chatgpt to help select the best non-US analogs to compare to.

                  LOL

                  I looked at Verizon and Vodafone, and then GM and Toyota, before I decided to actually do some real work on this and put some real data together. My results were inconclusive: verizon is kicking vodafone’s ass, but then again telecom is absolutely fucked in this country so no big surprise there. GM and toyota split the metrics pretty evenly; one better in one area, the other better somewhere else.

                  What the fuck does any of this have to do with the margins in rental apartments?

                  So I’m not convinced yet profit margins are abnormally fat in this country compared to international business. It’ll take a lot of data points from a lot of companies over a lot of years to really get a satisfactory picture of whether your point is truly accurate.

                  There’s hardly a more friendly business environment to stage your multi-national from than the United States…and that’s not only because we have people like yourself trying to thoroughly research how good they have it in order to prove a boot-licking point to some random stranger on the Internet, but also because here, unlike in all other countries, if you don’t like the regulatory environment you can quickly and easily buy yourself a congressman (or two)…oh and you can just send any manufacturing costs such as labor out of the country.

                  I think you’re missing the forest for the weeds here truly. I’m talking about a specific area and you’re trying to extrapolate it to the entirety of the world. I’m sure that there are some industries where the margins in the US are a bit thinner than they are elsewhere (especially when it’s not possible to move your labor too far from your business such as in retail), but what’s truly unique is how defeated and broken and used to giving it up to business we are in this country. Or to add one of my favorite Vonnegut quotes for color:

                  semi-related Vonnegut quote

                  America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. To quote the American humorist Kin Hubbard, ‘It ain’t no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be.’ It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters. The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man who is himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its wall asking this cruel question: ‘if you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?’ There will also be an American flag no larger than a child’s hand – glued to a lollipop stick and flying from the cash register.


                  On the specific point about rental rates and margin, and I’ll go even more specific into the locality…there’s scarcely a better margin business than taking a large complex full of 550 SQ FT apartments in southern california and charging an ever increasing amount of rent, pet rent, shit fees, and requiring more and more other things from renters every year (deposits, pet deposits, etc.).

                  California, “liberal” state that it is, managed to pass a huge restriction on this though…you can’t raise someone’s rent more than 10% year-over-year without giving the renter in the unit 90 days notice much to the horror of the landlord class who roused every rabble they could in protest.

        • June@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          I’ve got a friend who’s apartment got burned out due to a fire beneath them. She didn’t have renters insurance which has made the whole debacle an even bigger pain in the ass than it needed to be. If she’d had insurance her insurance company would have handled everything, instead she had to fight with the person who caused the fire’s insurance herself. She’s picked it up since then and is paying about $30/month.

          Renters insurance is so damn cheap every renter should have it. And for a few extra dollars add on a personal articles policy so if shot gets stolen it’s covered. I had two $2k bikes stolen from an old apartment and insurance paid out full replacement value on them with no issue and I got a nice upgrade.

        • crashoverride@lemmy.world
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          I don’t think so, when the water line broke in my apartment, my renters only covered my stuff. That’s what they have insurance for

      • rifugee@lemmy.world
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        Or burn your apartment down (Christmas lights, for example), which you would be on the hook for without insurance. It also covers your stuff if you get robbed. I personally think that it is indespensible.

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        Another thing they’ll do is say “oh no, you don’t need renters insurance, we provide you with renters insurance and build it into the price of rent.” And then you read through the lease to see what exactly their “insurance” covers and it’s basically nothing, so you have to get your own anyways, essentially paying for it twice.

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      It’s hard to evict shitty tenants if they don’t cough up rent. So they are very picky about who they rent to because there’s so many good tenants in line behind the shitty ones. Pretty simple explanation really.

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    Mandatory “use GIMP: is free and open source” comment

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    They wanted to DNA test my dog and keep his biometric data on file as part of the terms of the last lease I was looking at.

    I uhh, didn’t fucking sign. The neofeudalist movement is for real.

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      This so they can fine you when you leave your dog’s shit on the ground for other people to step in. I’m here for it. I lived in a place that did not enforce picking up after your animals and it was absolutely disgusting.

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        They don’t do that at all anyway, but hey at least the professional landlord class gets to inflict upon you one more indignity for some imagined benefit.

        The park adjacent to those buildings has so much dog turd in it you’d think they were purposely producing low quality fertilizer over there.

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            For the record I’m not actually pro “leave your dog shit everywhere” I just question both the imposition of the indignity of subjecting your tenants to pet DNA screening, and the effectiveness of it as a mechanism for preventing that.

            I actually am pro throw unbagged dog shit in a bag-containing garbage can though, and don’t really understand why anyone would care about that.

            I tend to see more of the leaving it on the ground, not even the throwing it in a can.

            Edit: Alright, you guys are right, you need at least 2 layers of bags for dog shit. But then I guess triples might be safer, or even quads. Fuck it, every piece of dog shit must be wrapped in at least twenty layers of plastic before it hits the landfill! We need to preserve the remains of this dog shit forever!! It’ll be our mummies!!! Inject it with formaldehyde!!!

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            Guess your tenants don’t have a working dishwasher and a window that’s been broken since before they moved in that is totally gonna be fixed before they move in?

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          https://www.pooprints.com/

          Hate to break it to you dude

          "We are the DNA dog waste management company offering a solution to pet pollution in 7,000+ communities across the U.S., Canada and the United Kingdom. It isn’t just a problem in your community—it’s everywhere. "

          And here I thought it was pretty common to have your children and pets DNA tested by your apartment manager. Hasn’t this always been the case?

    • kromem@lemmy.world
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      Yeah, they do that these days to identify who lets their dogs poop around the property and don’t pick it up.

      • aesthelete@lemmy.world
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        Nobody’s DNA testing dog stool. They can’t be bothered to even do routine move out cleanings in those apartments. The whole thing is a giant farcical pretendy power game played out by managers far away designing a system for the benefit of their rentier owners to simultaneously rob renters of their last scraps of dignity and every remaining dime they have in the form of bullshit fees.

          • aesthelete@lemmy.world
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            I’m aware that the apartment people aren’t running the DNA database themselves. They have some weirdo company that does it. I’m also aware that that weirdo company (or companies) is capable of putting together a website.

            I’m saying I live in the same neighborhood (I bought a place). Nobody is going through that park and picking up the dozens of available dog stool and sending it off to some lab to be tested. They just aren’t. The whole fucking thing is a wet dream had by some awful corporate bureaucrat that only succeeds in making renters lives a little more miserable and pads the pockets of some other random, doggy DNA database building weirdo somewhere else.

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              I’m going to briefly go on a related rant here that you can feel free to ignore.

              rant

              People in America have this perspective that if somehow you devise a theoretical solution to a problem (especially if it’s fancy and requires “tech” and “DNA” and labcoats) that you will magically have solved the problem. This isn’t actually the case, and it’s shown to not be the case over and over and over again in this country and everyone still seems purposely ignorant to that simple concept.

              Things have unintended effects. Systems can have effectiveness issues. System costs (of all types, not just monetary) on all parties involved in the administration of those systems are often left unconsidered because it’s not part of the problem solver’s business model. Convoluted systems will not be fully understood by the agents who are supposed to implement them. Modern, technical solutions to problems are not magically better or more effective than the alternatives that are very often never even considered, simply because it wouldn’t give you a reason to strap on a lab coat, or start up a new SaSS company.

                • aesthelete@lemmy.world
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                  I dunno maybe it isn’t entirely but it’s a very pervasive attitude here.

                  Look at the COVID death numbers in the US versus some places that had the common sense to just use masks.

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              Well I don’t know what to tell you. We had a guy two months ago who was arrested because his dog was pooping on the premises and he did not clean it up.

              This is a half a billion dollar a year industry.

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                Arrested? Lol

                In my area you can’t even get anyone to care at all.

                Maybe if someone’s dog pooped directly in the property manager’s mouth… Otherwise, forget it.

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                You think they have a lab in the apartment complex and they’re doing the testing themselves? 😆

              • Rambi@lemm.ee
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                You’re saying the business that the other commenter provided a link to is a “conspiracy theory”?

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            You caught me, I’m complaining about DNA testing of dogs because it’s actually me sneaking out at night and pooping (not even the dog, but me). I shit out there just for you, bud.

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              You don’t understand, PooPrints has got your number. They ship dog poop around SIX countries, didn’t you read the site!?

              It’s frustrating out there, but keep up the critical thinking fight. The ones you reach usually won’t be ones replying.

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        Or…They threaten to do this and just keep your $600

        It’s really the threat that motivates people, and it’s the free $600 non-refundable deposit that motivates the landlords.

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    You don’t even need photoshop. Just use the inspect function in your browser and edit the values directly in the HTML. Free and much easier to not fuck up the formatting.

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    They don’t check your credit? They checked my credit the last time I rented.

    Also you don’t need to photoshop when it’s easier to edit the html.

      • Potatos_are_not_friends@lemmy.world
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        I had 800 credit working fast food because l carried extremely little debt.

        Twenty years later, my score is fighting to stay about 750 because I make 6 figures, a few credit cards with zero debt. Because they WANT me to hold onto debt to show my trustworthiness? Fuck that.

        • stevehobbes@lemm.ee
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          Nah, there’s something else that’s triggering it. Average length of credit matters a lot, so if you cancel cards and get new ones frequently that would do it.

          Long term debt for sure is good, carrying balances on cards is never rewarded.

          The reason they’re OK extending credit when you have debt is because they can see you are managing it. Mortgage or auto loans (asset backed) aren’t bad. Don’t carry balances on cards ever if you can avoid it.

          As another poster said, there’s probably no functional difference for you between 750 and 830.

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            No you don’t. Technically you get a small (~10 point) bonus for showing literally anything other than $0. But you get zero points for carrying that balance beyond the payoff date.

            You should never ever ever pay interest on credit cards. It doesn’t help you in any way.

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        Yes, but also you don’t get good credit by entering into contracts you can’t afford. What I can and can’t afford are my decision to make.

        Just like you can have good credit and low income, you can have high income and be shit with money. It really doesn’t prove anything by showing a pay stub.

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        Experian offers a service called “theworknumber” that will sell you income data to anyone for $60.

        You cant opt out because fuck american laws, but you can demand they “freeze” it like credit, so any inquiry is just rejected.

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          That may solve who’s texting me if I’d like to sell a property. They keep asking me about properties i haven’t owned for years but I use to live at.

          • Trainguyrom@reddthat.com
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            At least you get texted about properties you once owned. I get texted about some dude’s properties across the country even though this hasn’t been his number for a good decade now

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              Haha it’s just weird to get a txt asking if I want to sell x property I haven’t owned for twenty years.

              It has to be a credit report thing as my gf gets txt about the properties and she has never been on the loans or titles. The properties are always in my name.

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      I “forged” documents with gimp once — needed to print out and sign something for a wire transfer when I was abroad. I pasted in my signature and sent it back, but they said it needed to be print out, scanned, and sent back. So I opened it in gimp, added noise and rotated it by a degree or so to look like it was scanned — and they accepted it, no questions asked. So…I forged my own documents.

      Banking in the US is sometimes a bit humorous. (Meanwhile, in the country I was staying, at the end of the night someone picked up the tab, wrote down their bank account number, and said “transfer me $XYZ thanks” — was pretty great.)

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    No one going to bring up the fact that adobe is an anagram of abode?

    They got their abode with adobe! This is no coincidence! I’m inclined to say this goes all the way to the top!