*Dear room mates:
Stop trying to fuck me in the ass. Please keep in mind that I am a trained military officer. I can easily put a slug in your head from a 1000 yards away. You wont even see it coming.
I’ll be sending my Dad over in short order. I strongly suggest you don’t fuck with him either as the military runs strong in our family. As a retired Navy Seal, he could easily snap your pencil like neck with his forefinger and thumb.
Yours truly,
JerseyMarine2092.*
Wow. If someone receiving low-income-housing vouchers tried a similar system (i.e., putting or keeping their name on a lease for no other reason than to get extra taxpayer money in their pocket), would it bug you then? I’d find it reprehensible then, and I’d find it reprehensible in this case as well.
The ethical thing to do is to NOT take my money to pay for an apartment you have no intention of living in, just in order to supplement your income.
Yeah, that makes sense and it changes the story entirely. “My buddies are fucking me while I’m helpless in another country” is different than “My buddies are helping me work the system, and I’m upset because they want a bigger cut.”
All of the “extra person on the lease” stuff doesn’t make sense in the straight forward scenario. With the new info, though, you can see how he’d be responsible for these extra charges. Essentially, he is paying his buddies $200.00 to keep him on the lease, a move that nets him $1,700 more than he’d get if he had his things in storage (hell, his things don’t even matter here- he isn’t paying for the storage, he is paying for the lease.)
In this case, he does owe for any extra charges that entails. You get a big benefit from that lease, and you are responsible if that is costing people money.
There is an old saying that you can’t scam an honest man. This may be the way that you are tacitly encouraged to work the system and that’s how the game works, and you aren’t really being dishonest or doing anything unusual. But you are working the system, and working the system puts you in a vulnerable spot. When you ask people to lie for you, you run that risk.
Wait a minute. You say that utilities are divided by the number of total occupants, not the number of units. If that’s true, then you need to know the total utililty bill and the total number of occupants before you can determine the incremental costs associated with having you added as a tenant. Because each tenant’s percentage is not based on the number of roommates in just his room, but the total number of occupants.
For instance, let’s imagine a scenario with 4 units and a utility bill of $2000. Assume Unit 4 is the OP’s room. Unit 1 has 1 occupant, units 2 has 2 occupants, and Units 3 and 4 have 3 occupants, for a total of 9 tenants. Each occupant would owe $222.
Now let’s add one roommate to Unit 4, for a total of 10. EACH OCCUPANT would now owe $200. That is a saving of 10% for each roommate.
It’s not gaming the system, though. It’s the way the system works. See, when you’re at home and on active duty, you can either live on-post or off-post. If you live on the post, then you’re assigned housing and you don’t pay any rent or utilities (obviously). If you’re off-post, then the Army compensates you with BAH, which is basically the money they’re saving by not having to take care of you. What you do with that money is your own business. If you live in a palace, you have to make up the difference. If you live in a closet, you get to keep the money.
When you are deployed, then somebody’s got to maintain your place at home, or else you’d have a lot of vets coming home to find their furniture was tossed on the curb and someone else is now living in their apartment. I’m sure you can agree that that’s not cool. It’s also not cool to force someone to move out of their home just because they’re deployed for a year, even though they’ve been living there for, say, five years.
So if you can’t toss the servicemember on the street and you can’t force the landlord to let a unit go rent-free for an entire deployment and you can’t make a servicemember pay for something he’s not using (cuz then he’d be de facto kicked out), someone has to come up with the money. So the Army does that.
Then you have to factor in fairness. Should Private Smith get more money that Private Jones just because they live in separate apartments? Well if that were the case, they’d both just go rent another apartment for the max allowable amount and sublet the old one. Better to just pay everyone the same thing relative to the cost of living of their area. So that’s what they do.
Most soldiers can’t fit all their worldly possessions into a closet. So the fact that the OP can do that is just a bonus to him. He’s not scamming anybody…he’s entitled to that money. That entitlement goes away if he’s not actually on a lease and has his stuff in his parent’s basement.
Does that make sense? Do you see why he’s not being unethical pocketing the difference? Do you see why it would be unethical if he got off the lease?
He’s not being unethical, but he is gaming the system. I’ve worked in the federal system, and so I know all about it- I once got a month’s vacation and a free plane ticket anywhere in the world due to a minor sub-regulation. Rules are rules. Every system has ways that people maximize the benefits, and when it becomes routine, that becomes an expected part of the compensation package.
But it’s still gaming the system. His room is not sitting idle. His landlord is not losing money on him.
Him and his buddies set up a little white lie saying he still "lives’ there, when really he doesn’t live there in any meaningful way. In return, they get a cut of his benefits. This plan has run into some unexpected expenses- it turns out that being on a lease isn’t without any costs. He thinks those are his buddies’ costs to cover out of their cut. His roommates think he should cover those costs with his (much bigger) cut.
Ask the military. If I’m understanding your explanation, if you don’t have an apartment, you’re not entitled to that money, right? Whether that’s fair or not, that’s the deal you signed up for. Keeping your name on a lease for the sole purpose of getting that money is gaming the system, and I find it bizarre that anyone would argue otherwise.
Do you think it’d be acceptable for some private to put an ad on Craigslist saying, basically, “I need someone to let me put my name on their lease so I can get the housing allowance; I’ll pay you $100 a month if you’ll let me do that”?