If you live with roommates for ten years, you’re bound to get a few you regret. This one started as the roommate who followed me in a move to Philadelphia to share rent/escape the boonies.
It started well enough, but our spectacularly poor apartment wore on the friendship. Then she went off her meds, spent most days smoking weed, and only held one temp job in a year. I quietly started looking for a new place in March, ten months into the year lease. Her savings ran out in April. Since we’d both signed the lease, someone had to pay the full rent or we’d both be in trouble.
I paid it to save my own credit rating/ not get evicted, with her promise to repay me. When she found out I was looking to not continue to support her, she stopped talking to me, then quietly moved out while I was at work. She basically vanished from contact after that.
Well, she’s popped up again on the internet and is apparently a “model/artist” in Philly somewhere. I don’t expect that she’s much better off financially or mentally, if her online comments are any indication. On one hand, it’s a standard life lesson about roommates and she probably can’t pay it anyway. On the other, it is 650 dollars. I can produce cancelled checks showing I paid full rent that month and she paid nothing, though our former landlord has lost the building to foreclosure and I cannot locate him to get proof from him.
Is it worth even pursuing this? How would I go about contacting her? All I have is her Facebook profile.
Keep careful track of how many hours you sink into this project. After about 10 hours of futile effort, I think I’d chalk it up to good money after bad. Just MHO.
Well, Judge Judy would be all over it and then you’re able to collect.
Small claims court is the other option, and it’s not super expensive to file ($50 maybe) but even if you win, collecting your $$ will be tricky if she has no job.
Finally, you could hire a large man to go break her legs, but that is totally illegal so don’t do it.
I’m not a lawyer (obviously) I don’t play a lawyer on tv, and pretty much every law ‘fact’ I know is from The People’s Court.
It seems to me from watching court tv shows that you would need one of two things- either a written statement from her that she intended to pay you back, or one or more payments she’d made to you, which shows intent to pay you back. Otherwise, she could claim that you paying her share was a gift from you to her, and that there was never any expectation on your part for her to pay you back, and it’s her word against yours. There’s very little chance you’ll ever see the money again- I’d chalk it up to a life lesson.
I would just forget about it and write it off on your taxes as an uncollectable debt. I did this once in a similar circumstance and got a nasty gram from the deadbeat because they got pinged by the irs on the unreported income. It felt good though i never got the 800 they owed me. I had very little documentation, probably less than you.
I’m not clear on the timeline – she ran out of money in April of 2012 and disappeared out this spring/summer? Or are we talking about this occurring in 2011 or earlier?
Not worth pursuing through the courts, even if you had all the paperwork, which you don’t, it sounds like. It’s just going to renew an old conflict, not bring resolution, and further antagonize you. What’s the upside?
You admit she likely doesn’t have the money. So what are you looking for? Revenge? Vindication? Acknowledgment? Because I doubt very much that you’ll get any of those for your trouble.
It seems to me that this is a $650 lesson in, ‘letting things go!’ If you’re still hot enough, to want to pursue this, with no hard evidence, years later, then it’s a lesson you definitely need.
Count your blessings it wasn’t 6 months rent and Let It Go.
It was earlier. She vanished toward the end of that April I paid full rent, when I told her I wasn’t doing it again. The rest of the lease was taken care of when the landlord got foreclosed on a week later, so I didn’t have to worry about subsequent months. She was hidden somewhere since then and had no internet presence till recently.
I had a roommate abscond once. Long story, but to make it short, he hung me out for about $800. I took him to court, I won (he gave the judge the same story he gave me and the judge told him the same thing I and the landlord told him “You’re a moron, you can’t just walk out on a lease because you feel like it”).
Anyways, judge ruled in my favor. Now, here’s the thing. Everyone always says “You can get a judgement, but you’ll never collect.” He mailed me a check the next day, I cashed it and that was the last contact I had with him until about 6 or 7 years later. His wife tracked me down and asked me to sign something saying that he made good on the judgement (which I did). Turns out that since I never let the court know that he paid me, he couldn’t take out a mortgage to buy a house. So, to all those people that say you’ll have a hard time collecting. That might be true in some cases, but if he had never paid me, I’d have been able to hold that over his head.
BTW, this is why you always pay rent with a check. I’d further suggest that if you split rent with someone, you each pay your half to the landlord with a check made out to the landlord or if you must give half to your friend (and they write one check to the landlord), give your friend a check…not cash.
In my case it was cancelled checks that made this all work out in my favor. Without them, the judge would have dismissed the case as ‘his word against yours’.
Oh, so that’s the modern-day euphemism. Good- it doesn’t besmirch us innocent seamstresses. And that’s the way I’m leaning- though the tax idea might work out if uncollectible debts work in your favor.
Seriously? You’re going to chase a lazy, unstable and probably impoverished flake for $ 650 in another city? You need to think hard about how this is likely to pan out.
That sounds like the absolute best-case scenario, OP, and most likely you’ll spend a lot of time, aggravation and money for nothing. (I didn’t even know you could write off something like this with the IRS, though: fightin’ ignorance!)
You could just try a nice email saying you realize she was going through a rough patch at the time, and you understand, but now that she seems to have her stuff back together, could she please send you the money she owes.
Probably won’t work, but you never know. And trying to pursue it legally is probably going to end up being more of a pain then its worth.